I leased a Shadow Black one yesterday morning :smile:
After having told me way back when (September) that he would honor the national advertised lease deal ($1,999 down, $279/mo), I go in and, of course, it turns into negotiations. Mrs. Toe told me this would happen, she was right. I fortunately had a pretty strong hand, because another dealer who had 3 available quoted me a deal close to the national deal. I actually had to get in the old car to drive off to the other dealer when the sales manager comes out and starts waving me back in. Such drama :tongue:. Glad I will not have to go through that process again. When we were talking to the guy who handles the leasing paperwork, he was even joking about the whole process. He said getting in the car and starting to drive off without looking back is the key. There you have it. There are not going to be a lot of the Shadow Black ones out in the wild, so I'm not surprised about the arm twisting going on. Of course after we shook hands on the deal, we were all the best of friends :wink:. As I was driving off, the head guy did come and say that he thought that EV's were the future, and he wished that Kia would send him more as they were doing a very brisk business at the dealership.
I ended up driving about 60 total miles. The only part that I actually clocked was a stretch on the freeway that varied between free moving and stop-and-go traffic. I went 28 miles on 27 rated miles. I'll report back more on this after I get some additional miles under my belt. I plugged into my condo charger last night, and used the phone app to stop the charging when it got to 96%. The rated miles at that point showed 109. The "reserved charging" feature the car has allows one to set a fixed charging time (day and time), for those with cheaper power at night. There is also a radio button selector that allows you to charge to 80% or 100%. My commute is about 14 miles round trip per day. So I will probably end up charging maybe twice per week, using the overnight method to go to 80%. And only do 100% charges when I need to do much more driving.
Absolutely loving the car so far. Mrs. Toe threatened to hijack the car whenever she gets the chance. Her commute is much longer than mine (60 miles), so I encouraged her to do just that as much as she wants. We will be getting the white sticker soon, which will also allow solo access to both carpool and Fastrack lanes. Will report back when I have more operation information to share. So happy to have joined the EV revolution. I'll post a pic later on when I get a chance to take a nice postcard shot somewhere...
RT
