We’ve spent most of the last couple of days buying our new Kia EV-6. I spent most of yesterday talking, texting, and emailing with dealers who had responded to our request through the Consumer Reports Build and Buy Service as well as a couple I contacted directly. Stevens Creek Kia had the best prices by a fairly good margin; Dublin Kia wasn’t far behind but was far less convenient.
Our preferred car was a Yacht Blue Wind RWD with the Technology Package and a grey interior; unfortunately, that combination doesn’t seem to exist. We did find exactly one Yacht Blue Wind RWD with the Technology Package and a black interior; it was at Putnam Kia in Burlingame. I asked for their best price and it was a couple of thousand more than the price for a similar model in Gravity Blue at Stevens Creek Kia. Putnam claimed they’d match a written offer from Stevens Creek but wouldn’t accept the web page pricing as a “written offer” so I decided to go with Stevens Creek…only to discover that they’d sold the car I was looking at. They did have a Wind RWD with the Tech package, but its exterior paint was Glacier, which we didn’t like.
Capitol Kia had Yacht Blue cars, but none with the Tech package, and they didn’t expect to get one this month.
And that’s where I left things last night, too tired to write.
This morning, I went back to the web and discovered that Stevens Creek had a Wind AWD with the Tech package, Interstellar Grey paint and a grey interior; it cost a bit more than the RWD trim, but we decided to go for it and gave the dealership a call when they opened. They confirmed that the car was available, so we drove straight there to take a final test drive.
We liked it and said “we’ll take it”. Three hours later, we were the proud owners(*) of a bouncing baby EV-6. The finance guy did try to sell us an extended warranty, but that was the only attempt to upsell us – no rustproofing, VIN etching, or other nonsense.
Why the asterisk? We had to finance the car through Kia to get all the offered discounts (which turned out to be slightly better than the tax credit on a lease); there’s no pre-payment penalty, so we can pay the car off any time.
We didn’t take the car home right away, though. I’d driven the Subaru to the dealership in hopes that their trade-in offer would be close to the one I’d gotten from Carvana; it wasn’t, so we had to get the Subaru home – but we definitely wanted to drive home together on that first drive in the EV-6. So we drove the Subaru home for lunch (it was nearly 2pm by now), which also gave the dealership time to charge the battery in our car before we picked it up (their Level 3 charger is broken, so they couldn’t do it while we waited).
We took a Lyft back after dinner and picked up the car, which only took about 20 minutes (mostly getting registered in the Kia app for the car). It drives nicely, but it’s going to take a while for me to be comfortable getting it into the garage next to the Prius.
Kia doesn’t provide a portable charger with the EV-6 (boo, hiss!), so we couldn’t plug it in at home – not as much of a loss as you might think, since we only have a 110V outlet in the garage which charges the car at roughly 2% per hour. I have an electrician coming out Thursday for a second estimate of the cost to run two 220-volt circuits to the garage (one for the car and one for the water heater); it wasn’t urgent when I scheduled the visit, but it is now!
And there’s homework to be done, too.
