Sourcing a stripped Bolt

Due to a perfect storm of federal credits, employee pricing, and GM credit card points, an otherwise extremely frugal friend of mine is considering his first and probably only new car purchase. He's hot on the idea of picking up a stripped down Bolt for his next DD.  When done right, he should be able to get it for about $16k. He can find them optioned up, but he wants to spend as little as possible and is having trouble finding anything, what's the best bet for finding this unicorn *in stock somewhere* ASAP? Talk to a local dealer? 

And here I thought this was going to be a thread about threaded fasteners!

Edit:  Dealers generally will have well-optioned cars on their lot.  For one thing, it's what tends to sell best.  For another thing, they make a lot more money on a well-optioned car.  It may well be that to find a "stripper" you will need to order it that way and wait for them to build it.

In reply to 1988RedT2 :

In reply to 1988RedT2 :

Gotcha. That makes good sense. Sadly the credit won't last long enough for a custom build, IIRC

In reply to P3PPY :

I would talk to a dealer.  They can check with other dealers if such a car exists on another dealer's lot and make arrangements to transport it (or drive it) to the local dealer.  I don't know what inventory levels are like for the Bolt right now, but I wouldn't expect such a car to be easy to find.

Edit:  Based on what I'm seeing, lowest sticker is like $26,500.  $16k I suspect will be difficult.

Looks like they all got shipped to St. Louis. There are a bunch there at the 1LT level. I'm assuming he is looking at the Teens after the credit which doesn't come right off the sticker price. 

Bolt inventory

All the local ones here in the PA neck of the woods are $28-29k worth.

Chevy's website has a search inventory feature.  Looking at that, there's several at Bommarito Chevrolet South (wherever the heck that is) for a dealer ask price of $26,594.  Quirk Chevrolet lists a handful at $26,095.  No idea where that is, either.

Edit: bmw88rider beat me to it by a mile.

According to the reddits the ones at Bommarito are a fleet order and not available for sale.  

In reply to moxnix :

Probably Dominos Pizza cars

Funny story...Late Oct or Early Nov I was on the main drag in small Findlay, OH when I passed this Dominos and what looked like a pretty big photo shoot complete with reflective flash panels, etc.  I remember feeling bad for them in that it was raining during their big production.  

This Dominos with the glass building next door.  

wae said:

Chevy's website has a search inventory feature.  Looking at that, there's several at Bommarito Chevrolet South (wherever the heck that is) for a dealer ask price of $26,594.  Quirk Chevrolet lists a handful at $26,095.  No idea where that is, either.

Edit: bmw88rider beat me to it by a mile.

Quirk is in Braintree, MA, south of Boston (although they also have a branch in NH)..

Uh...McMaster-Carr?

1988RedT2 said:

And here I thought this was going to be a thread about threaded fasteners!

Haha, same here. I was going to post "Don't bother, we all have some in the garage somewhere that we can send you." 

Unless this "friend" is sleeping with someone at the dealership, I don't see how a brand new one could possibly be $16K.

A little off-topic, but look how dramatic that Dominos looks in the second shot. 

David S. Wallens said:

A little off-topic, but look how dramatic that Dominos looks in the second shot. 

Wide angle lens, shoot from down low, and turn up the color saturation.  Also helps that the image is sharp -- has someone been smearing vaseline on the lens of the Google street view car camera? :)

In reply to codrus (Forum Supporter) :

Yup. And it shows how you can take a rather striking photo almost anywhere. (Hosing down the ground didn't hurt them, either.)

David S. Wallens said:

A little off-topic, but look how dramatic that Dominos looks in the second shot. 

Notice that they photoshopped out the Chase logo. You can see 6 top windows in the good pic but on the google pic the logo starts at the 4th window. 

But, they did not take out the slight bit of red Jeep on the right side of picture. 

John Welsh said:

David S. Wallens said:

A little off-topic, but look how dramatic that Dominos looks in the second shot. 

Notice that they photoshopped out the Chase logo.

Also the telephone/power lines that are running down that street.

The other reason for shooting down low like that is that you can hide all kinds of stuff behind the foreground subjects (the cars in this case).  The gray parking posts, the handicapped parking sign, etc.

They did make sure to have the "open" sign turned on and carefully placed between two cars though.

Good photog there :)

John Welsh said:

David S. Wallens said:

A little off-topic, but look how dramatic that Dominos looks in the second shot. 

Notice that they photoshopped out the Chase logo. You can see 6 top windows in the good pic but on the google pic the logo starts at the 4th window. 

But, they did not take out the slight bit of red Jeep on the right side of picture. 

That's a Tuscadero Jeep, color wasn't out too long. 

Maybe this will flood the used market one day: The Chevy Bolt is the official EV of Domino's. 

In reply to David S. Wallens :

The interior smell... 

David S. Wallens said:

A little off-topic, but look how dramatic that Dominos looks in the second shot. 

While it makes for an eye catching photograph and is great for ad copy, I really don't like photos like that. Especially when it comes to nature scenes or subject pictures. You know for a fact that the place in the picture doesn't exist like that in real life. It's just someones rendition of what they want it too look like. As it is now, you take your digital camera, spray and pray 1000 shots, dump them all into Lightroom and make them look like anything you want.

Then again, I really don't like CGI either.

Show me the real world.

Well, folks, he got one. Thanks to the dealership link. He'd already checked there but called again and the fleet purchaser did take the first 100 but declined 50 of them so he put his name on the list.

The rest of the purchase was one headache after another and only happened because of his tireless legwork.

The stealership (and I do mean that in this case!!) looked up the VIN on their internal GM lookup tool and told him it wasn't going to qualify for the credit. He did a bunch of researching and called GM and the reason was that it was originally designated as a fleet sale. So he got them to update the corporate lookup tool and he has the dealer check again and suddenly the dealer says "hey apparently it does qualify for the rebate" - no thanks, no nuthin -- even though now they can surely sell these much more easily to John Q. Public. Suddenly though there's a $1,500 dealer markup that's not a markup because it happens to be in high demand now. >:/

Then they messed up the GM card discounts and he had to work with GM for a week to figure out what the dealer had done wrong and keep haranguing the dealer to make it go through. At one point they were like "do you want to just pay us up front and we will pay you back if the discounts go through?" Right. 
 

Anyway, I've been out of the loop for the last week or so of headaches but it is now at his house.  

Oh and after all was said and done, including the home charging kit, it came up to $20k (apparently he couldn't apply both the GM employee discount AND the credit card points).