tire questions on lease turn in

I have a 2012 leaf that I am going to be turning in at the end of august. My inspection is beginning of next month. I think I will need tires. Looking at local tire shops it looks like the cheapest I can find for 4 tires is low 300 range after installation etc. Will it likely be cheaper to pay for the tires through nissan at the end of the lease or is it cheaper to get them on my own.

Also the tire shops want me to replace the tpms sensor when I get the new tires. Do I need to do that? There reasoning says better seal for the tire etc but I really don't care about the seal because I won be owning it that much longer.

rkshack

You don't have to do anything until after you get an inspection done (from what others have said not my own experience). Might as well get the quote from Nissan first on what it will need. If you don't like their price find out exactly what they need from the tires and then try used tires. They have to be of similar quality and a matching set, ie no $20 Chinese internet specials. You may even get lucky and find that 2 of your tires pass, there's the advantage of not rotating LOL.

I guarantee Nissan won't be taking the tires off to check the TPMS sensors so as long as they work when you turn them in that's a-ok. A rebuild kit isn't a bad idea if you're likely to keep the car a long time and have a high millage tire, and if the light on in the dash would bother you.

If you actually need new tires (less than 3/32" of tread, cracked, or non-matching), you might simply find some decent used tires and put them on. Don't worry about the sensor.

Don't forget the $500 of excess wear forgiveness if you lease or buy another Nissan (or Infiniti).

The $1000 "spring it on them after you've already cut your best deal" Leaf loyalty cash + $400 waiver of termination fee + $500 excess wear forgiveness is effectively a $1900 benefit.

The dealership i took mine to barely even looked at the car. They only looked at the mileage and the VIN; they didn't even walk around the car once to look for obvious damage!

I just turned in a Prius over the weekend. During the inspection, nothing was found that needed to be addressed. I was on the original tires and the car was at 31,000 miles. Also, had got a nail in one tire that could not be repaired, so I had one cheap oddball Walmart tire that didn't match the 3 others. I also had tinted windows and the inspector didn't mark me for that even though the lease docs said to remove the tint before inspection.
I figured I would see what the inspector said about the items I thought he would ding me on, and come to find out these were not issues.

Maybe different for Nissan, but they farm these inspections out to a contractor company anyways, so might be the same result for Nissan. For me, it was very painless.