lot of questions there brg2290....
Yes the $8025 is a lease rebate the essentially makes it way to cap reduction. Also the rebates vary from region to region and are married to YOUR zip code. So if you buy a LEAF from New York and their rebates are $15,000 you still can only use whatever rebates are available to you. However there are DEALER incentives that are married to dealerships, so if your local dealership/region doesn't have anything special you can go out of state/area to a dealer that does and they will use the rebates that are married to you, and the incentives that are married to them.
Lease math is far too complicated to try and explain easy enough, but basically Nissan takes a guess as to what the LEAF is going to be worth in 2-3-4 years and they base it off of that. For example they *guess* that your LEAF with an MSRP of $37k is going to be worth $21k in 2 years, that $16k difference is what you pay monthly. However you subtract the $8000 rebate, $1600 msrp to invoice, the $1000 hold back so you are paying $5400 for the 2 years. After that though you need to add tax, title, registration, ect... back in which is how you get your monthly payment.
No one ever got back to me about the dealer cash being able to be used on the lease, but I am standing firm by the 'probably not' option since using the above example of math you'd be paying $10 a month for the lease haha. However look back to the first paragraph, if there are any incentives that are married to the dealership you bought from they can be negotiated in.
Holdback you can google, but short version is it is money that Nissan (or any franchise) pays to the dealership immediatly after a sale. Yes this can be negotiated in on either a purchase or lease.
Yes the $7500 goes to Nissan Corp, and yes that is where the bulk of the lease rebate comes from. Check your local place for specifics, but the money offered in lease cash is the money, can't get anything more.
Dealerships likely to make a zero profit deal...they really prefer not to, but they need to sell cars. They might make $0 on you, but it might be the counter they need to get an extra $300 per car x40 cars which will make it in their best interest to sell you a $0 profit deal rather than letting you walk. However getting them down to the zero profit area is rough and time consuming which is why I've been posting the details on how to ask for the proper numbers
Can't fill in the blanks for your example, because the $5500 dealer cash won't apply. Also again figuring the math on a generic lease is far from that simple
You can look at the above example I posted for a rough idea, but it is fairly complicated to figure it out.
Lot of wording, didn't reread it cause my head hurts (typed this all out and hit my back button and had to rewrite it haha) so if any is confusing or typos sorry just reask lol.