Surreal Novelty

CWs: food, drink

Our garage smells like tires. It’s a clean smell, but a strange one. Reminds me of when my dad kindly gifted me his Cadillac Escalade, which I kept for awhile, and he had a new set of special snow tires that he threw in with it. We kept those tires in the closet at our tiny 1-bedroom apartment, and the whole closet smelled like rubber. That was kinda unpleasant. But this is different.

Why, you ask? Well, we finally took the plunge and bought a brand-new car on Black Friday. We have been saving up money for quite a while for a down payment, and decided that was the best time to do it. My spouse’s 2004 Toyota Highlander is, well, 20 years old, and it’s currently falling apart. It has had some major electrical issues, and it’s just time to be done with it. They’ve gotten 20 good years out of it (their parents bought it new, and eventually their dad gave it to them), so it’s had a good run, and it currently has almost 220K miles on it. And we’ve had it as our exclusive car for the last year and a half or so, after I got rid of the Escalade (we did not need two cars).

I would rather not have a car at all, but the reality of where we live is not super conducive to that. Our commute to the office is about 15mi each way, and the bus routes are not ideal, unfortunately. I could make it work, but it’d take me close to an hour each way, and I’d have to be at the bus stop, ~15min away, at 6:50am to make it work. Currently I leave the house at about 7am and make it there by 7:35 or 7:40am to start work at 8am. I am chronically early to everything. I am only in-office once a week, but my spouse is in usually twice or more per week, and sometimes needs to go south on business as well. So we unfortunately need the mobility, y’know? Public transit around here is pretty decent, but it could be far better, and I hope it continues to improve.

So in terms of harm reduction, I thought getting an EV would be best. They’re zero-emission, although I know that the power used to charge them isn’t always the cleanest, depending on where you live (there is a lot of coal power generation here, although the city is working towards cleaner energy like solar and wind). Not to mention the rare earth metals that go into the batteries. So EVs still need some improvement, for sure, but I’d far prefer an EV to having to buy gas. So a few months ago, we started looking at EVs and trying to figure out what would work best for us. Colorado has some ridiculously good EV tax credits currently, and there are federal tax credits as well. Given the political climate (gestures all around) in the USA, I am not counting on the federal tax credits (currently, depending on the car, up to $7,500) sticking around after the New Year, let’s just say that. And Colorado’s general tax credit of $5K is decreasing to $3,500 after the New Year. So we thought, this is the best time to do it, let’s make it happen.

Again, we took a lot of time searching for a car that would work best for us. Colorado has a page dedicated to EVs that’s run by Xcel Energy (which provides natural gas and electricity to many here; gas at least to us), which helps one compare the EVs out there, and Xcel even has their own rebate and credit programs, which did so well that they ran out of money for the year. So that’s good to hear that people took advantage of them! Anyways, we kept looking and looking, and the frontrunner for me the whole time was a Chevy Equinox EV. It’s a mid-sized SUV, not tiny, but not huge; the current Chevy Blazers are a little larger than it. I remember my dad had an ‘87 Blazer when we were kids and I remember it fondly. But ultimately I really liked the Equinox. My spouse’s boss has a Chevy Bolt EV, which is more of a hatchback, and is apparently also really nice, but they didn’t make a 2024 model, AFAIK since they had battery or production issues or something. So we would’ve had to get a used 2023 Bolt if we wanted one, which likely wouldn’t qualify for any of the credits. Basically, with all the credits being so good, we didn’t want to pass any of those up.

I got very discouraged a month or so ago when we went to our credit union and asked about applying for a car loan there. They said the rates were pretty high for interest, and we would be paying close to $1000/month, which is astronomically high, and very kindly suggested we may want to finance directly through the dealer/automaker for a better rate. We have a great credit union, and I appreciated them being frank with us about it. I was super bummed after that and didn’t really know what to do, and we thought about throwing in the towel on the whole thing and waiting and saving more money. Ultimately, though, with the car getting worse and worse, my spouse said it was time, and said we should try for it at the dealer.

We both had Black Friday off, and figured we would get up early that morning and be at the dealership first thing. That way, too, it was a Friday and we could get a cashier’s check or something for the down payment, if needed, from the bank. We just planned on using credit cards for the down payment and then paying them off immediately from savings, but it ended up being better to get a check from the bank. We got coffee and headed down to the dealership; we had checked their inventory and there were some Equinoxes and Blazers available, and even a used Bolt, great! We were greeted by a very kind salesman who said he’d be right with us; we arrived at 8am, but he said they didn’t actually open until 9, but he said it wasn’t a problem and would help us shortly. We asked to check out some of the Equinoxes, and also sat in one of the Blazers. I also sat in the used Bolt they had, but it wasn’t entirely comfortable for me, so we ruled that out pretty quickly. We asked to try out the Equinox for a test drive. The salesman spoke with us at length about the car, and he said he’s had 9 EVs since 2012 and loved them all, and even helped his kids with leasing them. He said he initially wasn’t sold on them, but found that he liked driving them better than gas cars. He also said that there is little to no maintenance; there is no gas, no oil, and just a bit of coolant to refill once in awhile. Wiper blades to replace, &c., but nothing major. Sounds like my kind of car (I don’t like car maintenance!).

In any case, he got us set up with the Equinox, took a copy of my license for collateral (understandable), and handed over the keys. We took it down the road a ways, and ultimately decided to drive around in the community college parking lot nearby, as no one was around, of course. From the start it drove like a dream, very smooth, responsive, and extremely quiet. It, apparently like many other EVs, has a “one-pedal driving” mode, which is exactly what you’d think: you only use the accelerator, and when you take your foot off of it, the car slows down and eventually stops. The idea is that instead of braking, the car will use effectively “engine braking” (they call it “regenerative braking”), the friction from which the car ultimately converts into energy to recharge the EV battery. So you can let the car coast and save some battery in the process! Regular braking also regenerates the battery a little bit, but it also wears on the brakes, while regenerative braking does not. It’s honestly a win-win situation, and the mode was immediately intuitive, and I loved it. (Spoiler alert: the salesman said that, with judicious use of regenerative braking and one-pedal driving, on one of his EVs he didn’t have to get a brake job until 150K miles! Wild.)

My spouse drove it a bit in the parking lot as well, and seemed to enjoy it. We were both really happy with it and said “let’s go for it” and hoped we’d get a good deal. I drove us back to the dealership, found a spot to park it near our departure point, and we went back in to talk with the salesman. He took down some information from us, we let him know how much of a down payment we were planning on, and then he ran some numbers in terms of financing. Not only did they knock a bit off of the sticker price, but they took the federal and state tax credits off the top (that is an option with the tax credits; they have to send some info to the IRS, and give you a tax form to file with taxes next year). And what a hell of a deal. We also got 0% financing, which means just that: a zero interest rate. So our car payments are just straight-up principal every month! Once we saw the ultimate price and the monthly payment, we were sold on it. We signed the paperwork and he said, OK, we’ll clean it up and get it on the charge, come back in about 3hrs and we’ll finish up the paperwork!

This all felt very surreal. I have never, ever owned a brand-new car. Everything has been either super used (like my terrible Hyundai Sonata I had when I lived in Florida, or the very used Volvo my parents bought for me and which I left before moving to San Francisco for grad school in ‘05), or a hand-me-down from my parents. Don’t get me wrong, I am extremely fortunate to have had the hand-me-downs and they got the job done, especially when I couldn’t pay for a car myself and needed one. But yes, this is quite a surreal, new feeling. We ended up doing some errands after that, including going to the credit union to get a check for the down payment, and getting lunch, and before we knew it, it was time to go back to finish things up with the car!

We went back to the dealership and then signed the financing paperwork, got our tax form for the credits, and it was essentially done. However, the salesman then took us out to the car and basically went through everything on the car with us in detail. In some ways it was a little over the top, but in others it was useful and I’m glad we had that walkthrough. All in all, we were doing all this stuff from 8am until almost 4pm, so it was a full day! After that, my spouse asked if I could drive the new car home, and they would take the old car. I ended up using one-pedal drive the whole way home and loved it. By that time it was getting dark.

The previous weekend, we worked on cleaning out as much of the garage as we could, since we want the new car to live in the garage, rather than the driveway. However, we hadn’t cleaned everything out, since we found that we couldn’t get the car into the garage fully. My spouse was extremely helpful, although not entirely patient (since we had been at this all day, and we were hungry and tired), and is way better at spatial things than I am. They are way better “at Tetris” than I am and making things fit, so we pondered how to get enough stuff out of the way to make it all work. We ended up putting a number of things in the attic space above the garage, and also took both of our bikes out of the garage and into the shed out back (which I have padlocked), and put some other things in there as well. From there, as the darkness was fast falling, we cleared enough space to get the car inside and close the garage. Phew. We were ready to be done after that, but thankfully had two more days of weekend left!

That was last Friday (hard to believe) and we haven’t charged the car yet. It left the dealership at 85% and it’s currently at around 61%. To be fair, we don’t drive a ton, but still. Once we get rid of the Highlander and it’s our only car, we’ll get a better idea of how long a charge lasts, but I think it’s gonna be great. The manufacturer recommends keeping the charge between 20% and 80% for best battery life; the idea is that if it’s not completely charged, there is room for regenerative braking to recharge it. Oh, and they threw in a home charger with the vehicle! It can plug into a 120V outlet for slower charging, or a 240V for faster charging. We don’t have a 240V outlet in the garage currently, but we should be able to get an electrician to put one in for not too much. That’ll be down the road a little ways, but it’s on the agenda.

Anyways I’m really happy with it, I think it’ll be great in the long run. I’m just kinda reveling in having something brand-new to take care of, and wow have cars come a long way in 20 years. There is every kind of fancy thing on it like backup (and even front!) cameras, collision alerts, and other fun stuff. And I can connect my phone via Bluetooth and play music! Like, I am excited about that, y’all, you don’t even know. Being able to play music via Tempo (Subsonic server) and stream everything is super exciting. I’ve tried it a bit on my commute and it’s wonderful! My spouse was using the Bandcamp app on their phone today and it worked great. The car comes with a 3-month SiriusXM trial subscription, but I feel like we won’t use it (I do not care about that). We tried it out today and there were a ton of channels and nothing on (my spouse said “OK, Dad” to that), so we threw on Bandcamp and also our local indie station.

Sorry to gush and be so prolix about this! It’s just a bizarrely new thing for me and I’m happy it worked out so well. Thanks for reading, friends <3