Bigscreen Beyond
My Bigscreen Beyond arrived today, right before I had to leave for choir practice. So of course as soon as I got home I set it up and tried it out. This is a quick first-impressions review.
CarMax is great
I feel like I need to sing the praise of CarMax, the dealership I bought the Niro at.
First of all: They had amazing prices on things, and a no-nonsense no-haggle policy. You pick out your car online, make an appointment to test drive it, and get some time with it.
They also did an amazing job of getting it ready for me. They performed all necessary service, including replacing the tires, and did a thorough inspection.
The inspection on mine missed two points: It was missing its emergency trickle charger, and there was a small but concerning crack on the windshield. When I pointed these things out, they immediately bought me a new, official trickle charger ($300) and paid for the entire windshield to be replaced ($700) — no questions asked, no proof required.
And with both issues, I’d called their service number outside of their business hours, and their answering service forwarded my concerns along and I got immediate contact, direct from the sales representative I worked with, as soon as they opened!
They also gave me the best offer on my old car by far, and worked really hard to get me every possible tax credit on the vehicle (the best one being the sales tax credit from the trade-in to begin with), and gave me a clear and concise explanation for why the ones I couldn’t get weren’t available. Not that it matters — the original price on the Niro was already ridiculously low, and the fact they’ve paid an additional $1000 to fix the issues mentioned above is a nice bonus on top.
This is 100% my own opinion, unsolicited, and I earn no commission or affiliate fee for saying this.
I honestly feel that CarMax is how all car dealerships should be.
The only thing I disliked about the whole experience is that they still aren’t quite equipped for EV sales, and don’t list things like range specs or show the battery condition on the inspection report. (For battery condition you really should bring an OBD-II scanner and an appropriate app, anyway. My Niro was still at 100%.) This is such an incredibly minor concern that I feel like it almost isn’t even worth mentioning, and as EVs get more popular this issue will definitely go away anyway.
So, yeah. CarMax is such a good experience. They are absolutely the way that car sales should be.
Bandcamp Friday, February 2024 edition
I don’t have any new releases on my bandcamp but if you’re interested in a wide variety of music, it is there for the buying, and during Bandcamp Friday none of the money from that goes to Songtradr/Bandcamp.
This weekend, you can also buy anything in my discography, including my entire discography, for 50% off using discount code TOOMUCHMUSIC.
And as usual I’m also trying to hype up others. This month I’m planning on buying:
Followup
I contacted CarMax about the missing EVSE, and they pointed me to a hidden compartment for service equipment, thinking it might have been hiding in there. The EVSE wasn’t in there either, but there was the “tire mobility kit,” so it’s good that I have the official one too!
Anyway CarMax is going to order me a replacement EVSE as well. Nice.
I suspect they saw the NACS adapter and confused it for an EVSE, which is easy to do — I’d made the same mistake during my test drive and walkaround!
But yeah so far I am very happy with the CarMax experience.
Bye LEAF, Hello Niro
Today the Niro became available for test drive and purchase, and I got the next available appointment. CarMax was super busy and they weren’t able to see me until nearly an hour after I arrived (ugh) but the process went pretty well.
I gave the car a test-drive and found that I really like it, and the OBD check showed no battery degradation whatsoever, so I decided to go through with the purchase. So now I have the nicest car I’ve ever owned (after giving the LEAF a little pat and telling it I appreciated our time together).
Car updates
Today I had an appointment at the Nissan dealership for them to appraise my car as part of a potential used-sale deal. They offered me $5500, or $6000 if I was willing to part with it same-day, and were giving me some pretty hard-sale tactics for an immediate agreement, but I told them that my replacement car hasn’t arrived yet and I couldn’t guarantee that I’d be actually buying the replacement.
They made me an offer of the full $6000 if I sold it to them now and just continued to borrow the car for the next week, but I again said no, as I’m not positive I’ll be buying the Niro.
This was also after they tried to FUD at me about the Niro, like they said that the Niro is “uninsurable” because of the break-in problems (which don’t affect the Niro, and the models which do have the problem haven’t had significant insurance difficulties either), and tried to bargain me into upgrading to a Leaf SV Plus, which is both outside of my budget and also doesn’t actually address the two critical issues I have with the Leaf (namely, CHAdeMO charging and a lack of thermal management on the battery).
SlimeVR: A brief review of my brief ownership
As mentioned the other day, my SlimeVR full-body trackers arrived, after about a year and a half of waiting. The last two days I used them pretty heavily, and then ended up just reselling them (at cost).
Transformative Meditations to return?!?!
For some reason Spotify occasionally rebroadcasts the old episodes of my podcast and whenever they do a notification goes out to all RSS feeds (including the one that gets autoposted to my Mastodon feed). I don’t know why they do this, but it certainly has the effect of reminding me that I need to make more episodes. And hey, it’s nice how it gives more visibility to the original 6 episodes.
Anyway, that said, I’ve gotten a few prompts for episodes to make and also I’ve revisited my prompt list and I’m getting some amount of inspiration. No promises, but hopefully I’ll get to making these again soon. I miss doing it a lot.
I am of course always open to receive prompts from others! Especially if they want to do a commissioned episode.
SlimeVR
Today my SlimeVR trackers finally arrived, after about a year and a half of waiting. I bought the 7+3 kit. I’ve got them set up pretty well, I think. Here’s some observations.
Car update
I ended up paying the $700 to get the Niro EV shipped to my local dealership and reserve it for my purchase. All of the reviews of this particular model are quite stellar, and this specific car is an incredible deal (as far as I can tell it’s deeply discounted since it was a former lease vehicle but it’s still in immaculate condition). I should be able to give it a test drive in a week or so.
This isn’t my dream car but it’s a hell of a lot better than my current car in every way that matters. Plus, all of the reviews that touch upon winter driving say that it actually has really good traction control and only experiences minimal range loss. And it still has a much bigger (2.5x) range to begin with.
It’s annoying to be spending this money right now but I’m fortunate that I can swing it and don’t have to go into debt as a result.