Picking Up My Volt

Heading out in an hour to pick up a 2013 in Crystal Red with beige leather.

No, it's not replacing our Prius, it's replacing an E36 BMW (328i).

My wife will become the primary driver of the Prius which will effectively replace her GM U van (Chevy Venture).

I'm really looking forward to this

 

Oh, my head hurts.
We had three cars, BMW, UVan and the Prius.
The Prius was my daily driver, the Uvan hers, the BMW ventured out when I felt like driving it, but was generally underutilized.

I wanted to pare us down to two cars (nothing to have to shovel around in the driveway in the winter) and it didn't make sense to keep the BMW if I wasn't going to drive it much (and if I made myself anxious about all of its deferred maintenance). After offing the BMW my wife offered to adopt the Prius as hers if I wanted to get something fun to replace the BMW. She also acknowledged that with the next empty we didn't need the capacity to move offspring in and out of apartments and dorm rooms anymore, so away goes the van (probably to a deserving relative).

Why not another Prius? I didn't want the two cars to be too much the same (though I entertained thoughts of a Prius C for a while). I did a lot of reading on the gm-volt forum and got a good feel for how it works and how well it works. And GM gave me $4,000 rebate plus a $500 supplier discount towards the purchase.

Kudos to Suburban Chevrolet for managing an extreme dealer exchange while giving me a tremendous deal on top of the spiffs.

The Volt is a treat for me, really, and should work well, as I have a 40 mile daily round trip commute. Given that I can score an honest 58-60 mpg on that commute in the Prius this time of year I'm thinking I might be able to accomplish most or all of it in electric mode in the Volt.

The drive home from the dealership:



It showed 8 miles range left in the battery when we arrived home.

 

Maybe.

 

Actually it looked like I was going to miss the rebate a couple of times.
We made our first dealership visit on June 29, having delivered our BMW to its purchaser first thing in the morning. The original rebate expiration date was July 1 and a quick check of regional inventory by that dealer showed nothing that matched what I wanted. I decided at that point that we'd wait for the MY 2014 prices to be published and place an order for one.
Four days later I discovered that the rebate had been extended a week and we placed a deposit with a different dealer who was looking at doing a swap for one in Ohio. When the other dealer refused to deal the second rebate expiration came and went with no joy.
Last Tuesday the rebate offer was extended to early September and it was reported that the 2014 pricing (and thus 2014 cars) wouldn't come out till late August.
I spent a few quality hours on Chevrolet.com that evening and linked up with a dealer that expressed confidence that a car could be found and who responded with an aggressive quote after I told them what I wanted for a price. I gave them my deposit on Wednesday, by Thursday I had a VIN no., on Friday the car was driven across from Frankfort, IL and Saturday morning I took delivery of it.
Today I did my 40 mile commute on 8.4 kWh, roughly 77% of the available battery range. It looks like I'm not going to buying any gas for it for a while.

 

Truth is, there are still a lot at the dealers if you don't mind black interiors.

Phillips Chevrolet in Frankort (where mine came from) has 56 Volts in stock.