KIA Niro PHEV | Fat Wallet Refugee

I’m almost to the finish line.

I got some helpful input from my relatives on which cars they had good opinions of. After reviewing my options I have finally settled on the 2020 Chevy Bolt EV.

The Bolt gets 259 miles of range with a 66kWh battery. It has all the technology I am looking for with Android Auto, a nice console screen, a backup camera, and safety features.

I found a nice dealership in Virginia that will be able to deliver the vehicle to me for $300. There are processing fees of $699 plus the cost of the vehicle itself, which is $16,000. The EV Tax credit will help a bit next year.

I have $11.5k in the bank and I have a one-year, 0% Balance Transfer offer on my US Bank Altitude GO card. I can probably get another 4-5k from that card without pushing the minimum payments too high.

My limit is 9k for that card and the BT fee would be about $199 for a $4,000 transfer. I am also getting 3k from my father as an early graduation gift.

So that should be about $18.5k available to cover the cost of the purchase plus registration fees. I will also need to get the car added to the household insurance policy. I was added to the policy earlier this year as a requirement to take the NC driving test.

I had dithered some time on getting a Kia Niro PHEV which has excellent mileage. The main problem I ran into with the Niro’s was that most were priced at 20k+ and often had 60-100k miles on them. I didn’t want to get something that was nearing the end of its life (or midlife).

I will be losing the larger trunk space that the Niro (19.4 ft³) has to offer if I go with the Bolt (16.9 ft³), but I think that is an acceptable trade-off if I can get a vehicle with 20-30k miles on it instead.

Another car I was looking at was the Nissan LEAF. The dealership only had the SV model (40kWh) available and I really wanted a Plus model which has a larger 62kWh battery. The trunk in the LEAF is much bigger (23.6 ft), this is despite having the wheel wells constricting the space.

So for now I am just getting my funds together to make the purchase. If a LEAF Plus shows up before I make the call, then I may switch to that vehicle instead. Otherwise, I expect to be driving sometime in May.

Thanks for reading, I appreciate your taking the time to be here. If you have any questions or comments for me, be sure to leave them below, and have a great day!

We’re almost into April now, but I have finally narrowed down my search to two final selections. Interestingly they are both from the same manufacturer: KIA.

It turned out that I had misunderstood the difference between how Hybrids (HEV) and Plug-In Hybrids (PHEV) work and their technology. My misunderstanding led me to discount PHEVs from consideration initially.

That confusion has been cleared up thanks to a YouTube video I recently watched. I am now looking to purchase a KIA Niro PHEV.

It’s a smaller SUV with a range of 510 mi total between the gas and battery. The MPG is 53 City / 54 Highway on the latest models. I would be looking for an older used model, so those numbers will likely be reduced.

The second vehicle I am looking for is the KIA Soul EV.

This is my backup plan if I cannot find a Niro in my price range (16k). The Soul is mostly seen in the wild as the standard Gas model since it is rather inexpensive, but I want the EV version. It would be great if KIA had made an HEV version, but we can’t have everything we want.

The Soul EV was actually discontinued in the US back in 2019 after they ran out of parts for manufacturing the cars. Called the e-Soul in Europe, the cars were in high demand and KIA made the decision to stop selling them in the US and focus on the European market instead.

Unfortunately, the US models only ever got up to 111 mi of range for the 2018-2019 models, while the older ones cap out at 93 mi of range. By comparison, the e-Soul gets around 221 mi of range for the 2020 model. I tried looking for imports but have so far had no luck.

The upshot for buying a Soul EV is the sticker price. Since the cars are relatively old now, the prices have dropped considerably. Not as cheap as the BMW i3 I previously wrote about, but it is still cheaper than a Niro Plug-In (22k+).

But, I still have time to find the right vehicle for me. I’ll keep you posted.