Thanks. I’ve thought about buying a new car for a while. Maybe a better way to put it is that I’m not afraid to make a choice. I just haven’t talked about it much. The time is right now so that I can sell the old one to my daughter and her husband. He wants a new car anyway. Trying to put their new baby in the back of his GTI is annoying and a little painful. As to the paint, I don’t think paint costs $1000-$2000 more just because it isn’t white. Maybe it’s the cost of being unique. OTOH, maybe it’s the cost of changing the paint line over from white to red, black, or whatever. The paint shop is most efficient when it runs continuously on a single color. I think your neighbor will probably use a charging station. Trying to charge a 52 kWh battery in a 120V line will take a very long time, maybe a day.
+1
When I custom-ordered my '97 Outback, I specified a paint color (Sydney Blue Pearl) that was apparently not very popular. When it got to the point of 2+ months after ordering with no indication of when delivery would take place, I contacted Subaru at the corporate level and I was told that they needed to accumulate at least 7 other orders for that paint color before they would build my car.
I was told that, if I wanted a particularly hideous orangey-red, they could build it immediately, but I didn’t want that color. In total, it took more than 3 months for me to get that car.
Yeah, when I spoke to the advisor he said that I could likely get a white one by the end of February but that any other color was unlikely to come in that early.
Congrats! I’ve got a lot of charger install info., having done some. If you have
any questions, post them up or ping me.
There’s no sport suspension option on the Malibu.
As noted, that will be a major problem unless he has easy access to a fast charger elsewhere. I wouldn’t buy an EV without having a fast charger at home.
Some states and some electric utility companies have tax breaks/subsidies for the installation of a home charger.
I suggest that you check with the MD gov’t folks and with your utility to see if these exist in your state.
The big problem at this point is that Mrs JT doesn’t want a home charger. I’ll drive off that bridge later. As it is, the cost per mile appears to be less or at least not more than for my Accord if I use a commercial charger. I can go for a walk while it charges or do a little shopping the 150 kW chargers near me are at Walmarts and other stores are nearby.
Does she give a reason for that . It just seems a logical thing to do . Maybe she is afraid of using it while a sleep and having a fire ?
I think the fire issue is it, though we haven’t discussed it. As I said, I’ll leave that issue for later. Installation is not cheap since the line has to be run from one end of the house to the other and through finished areas then into a finished garage. It’s about as expensive an installation as possible. I think the electric service panel can handle another 240V breaker at 60 amps. Also, no LFP batteries have been implicated in charging fires as I mentioned above.
Congrats on the new car. I wish you the best of luck with it. It has been a while since i bought a new vehicle, so I was surprised when they charged more for my color. It was only $95 more so no big deal. but $1000 -2000 more is a little nuts.
As the meme says, “If you don’t look back at your car as you walk away after parking it, you have the wrong car.” If you love the color and shape of your car, you will wash and wax it and generally care for it better, so it will last longer.
Also, comfort of the front seats can be a deal breaker. I take a 3-hour road trip four or five times a year, but even for those rare occasions, my seats have to be comfortable. I used to lust after the Porche Taycan until I sat in one. I immediately lost all interest in a Taycan.
Finally, if you plan on keeping the car for a long time, try to avoid cylinder deactivation, direct injection, and turbochargers. If you plan on getting rid of the car as it goes out of warranty, those things are not a concern.
Somehow, I don’t think that those features will be issue for Mr. Sanders 
I hear ya on the service run. I’m looking into a stationary generator and the installation costs for running the lines is a killer because of all the demo and finish work inside. It would actually be much less expensive for me to trench and run the line outside and around the house to the garage wall than to do the run inside.
I have two houses where Teslas plug in. When you put in the power for the Tesla, remember that an EV is a lot tougher on its power supply than than an oven or clothes dryer. Get your components from an industrial supply house, not the hardware store. Screw-on breakers are better than snap-in but standard residential breaker boxes won’t accept them. Be sure to correctly torque all wire connections. Too tight or too loose can lead to fires…
I can’t do it myself in my county even though it would be fun to try. I did all my electrical work in my previous two houses. I’m not a trained electrician and county inspections would make doing the work impractical. I suppose I’ll have time to consider how to do it and may try at a later date. The problem comes when I sell the house and don’t have inspection stickers approving the work.
I put house electrical work up there with car a/c work. Anything more than replacing an outlet I leave to the professionals.
Then you just pull the two ends. Nobody cares about a dead wire run in the wall.
High current demand circuits do require more diligence than typical service runs. But what makes you say a 48A run to the fast charger is any more demanding than a 50A run to the other loads in the house? Just curious.
The most common home configuration is a 2x40A breaker, and limiting the charging rate to 32A continuous. That sounds conservative, but people on the Tesla forums keep posting pictures of melted hardware store breakers and outlets. I have not heard of that happening on an oven or clothes dryer circuit. I presume the problem is DIY’ers over-torquing or under-torquing of connections, but $120 industrial components have much more robust connection points than do $15 hardware store components.