Magical Space Car and Patience, Pt 2

This is a follow up to Magical Space Car and Patience. So read that if you are lacking context.

I got the magical space car back. The dealer, having gotten 4 different charge housings that were broken in different ways, cobbled/Frankenstein-ed a working charge port housing out of it, got it all put back together within a day, and got it back to me on May 12th, 2025 and charged me for the labor and the charge port itself, but not for the housing. I drove away and have been driving the car to-and-from work, and it hasn’t behaved askance even once.

A small wrinkle is that I did ask them to do an emissions test so I could re-register it, and it failed because the code it was throwing about the charge port shorts made it fail. So that code was cleared but I needed to drive cycle it (“drive it for a week, mixed city and highway, letting it burn gas, so that the volt’s computer has had enough time to confirm that the emissions control bits are working properly”) then come back and get the free retest”. I went to a different emissions test place a bit too early and got the “This isn’t ready for it’s smog check” error, did an errand blast driving all over Atlanta with my hubby, used a fancy code-reader that could connect to bluetooth and a phone app that he got when he was going through the same thing with his old car (that was nice enough to show ‘is ready for a smog check’ status), got the “it is now ready for smog check”, used my free retest, and finally got cleared and re-registered for the next year.

I’m basically happy to be back where I was around January: cars compliant and registered. Now just to pay off the shiny new new and hopefully have some down payment before the Volt starts acting up again.