2013 Leaf acquisition advice

[vsiev]

You did realize you bumped a 2 year old thread right?

**note the edit I made to clarify.

"If you leased a Leaf you have a ridiculously low ownership cost. I ended up spending less than $7k on the car after tax credits, plus $900 in electricity for 24k miles. That's about $300/month including the car, "fuel", and taxes. And insurance has been really cheap too."

That's about the same as an Accord at 200 plus 100 in gas/month. The residual on the Accord at lease end would have most likely been calculated higher with it's known historical values.

"...after tax credits..." I take it you mean they wrote the contract based on the net and not the MSRP. Have you turned it in yet and finalized the lease? And you had what a 24 month lease, or do you plan to turn in 36 month early? How much down? And what's (was) the agreed on return value? Was battery capacity an issue? How did they (will they) deal with the cratering in depreciation?

Maybe you got lucky?

I dislike leases because they are too complicated to negotiate. Hard enough to beat through a sensible deal on a cash sale. How they calculate your residual, total miles driven, etc. that is where it all gets tricky, pretty sure they have a better information than the buyer on how to work the many factors in their favor.

 

[wantonsoup]

**note the edit I made to clarify.

"If you leased a Leaf you have a ridiculously low ownership cost. I ended up spending less than $7k on the car after tax credits, plus $900 in electricity for 24k miles. That's about $300/month including the car, "fuel", and taxes. And insurance has been really cheap too."

That's about the same as an Accord at 200 plus 100 in gas/month. The residual on the Accord at lease end would have most likely been calculated higher with it's known historical values.

"...after tax credits..." I take it you mean they wrote the contract based on the net and not the MSRP. Have you turned it in yet and finalized the lease? And you had what a 24 month lease, or do you plan to turn in 36 month early? How much down? And what's (was) the agreed on return value? Was battery capacity an issue? How did they (will they) deal with the cratering in depreciation?

Maybe you got lucky?

I dislike leases because they are too complicated to negotiate. Hard enough to beat through a sensible deal on a cash sale. How they calculate your residual, total miles driven, etc. that is where it all gets tricky, pretty sure they have a better information than the buyer on how to work the many factors in their favor.

Of course an Accord is going to be similar. The Leaf was $199/m and lots of other cars are in that price range. But A) The Accord in question is $22k versus the $36k Leaf I leased. And B) the Accord is going to use 900 gallons of gas to cover the same mileage. Over the last two years gas was $3.50-4.00. That's $3150 versus my $900 in go juice. $2250 savings right there. At the current $1.80/gallon, the Accord would cost $1650, still about double my cost.

Anyway, do your own math. Why so negative?