Hello fellow hackers, I’m about to pull the trigger on my first-ever auto lease on Memorial Day weekend. I want an affordable lease for a spacious, comfortable car with premium interior, 40+ miles of pure electric range, adaptive cruise control, and carpool lane sticker. The only option is the Honda Clarity Plug-In Hybrid with Touring/leather interior. I test drove it and it’s great except the volume control on the radio sucks. Lease prices with 0 down and 12K miles/36 months for Clarity plugin base model are about $300/mo and for Touring/leather it’s about $360/mo. My questions are:
To get the best deal: Should I execute the lease and close the final deal before, during, or after Memorial Day weekend? I assume the latest day I should close it is on May 31st.
To get California CVRP rebate I need a lease of at least 30 months, but all the leases are 36 months. But I would strongly prefer 30 months instead of 36 because EV technology will be way better in 2020 and then I can get a new lease at the end of the year in December (best month to buy a car). Has anyone done a 30-month lease at Honda instead of 36-month lease? Is that possible? I’m aware I’ll lose half my CA registration cost for the 3rd year but it’s probably a loss of only $200 so it’s OK.
Looking again at the websites, I don’t see $0 down and $300 for base model anymore, now I see that Culver City Honda website has Offers for $0 due at signing and $341 per month for base model. I assume there’s tax and fees added. Also Robertson Honda in North Hollywood has $288 per month with $1K down+fees and Keyes Honda Woodland Hills has $198 per month with $3888+fees down.
All of these offers are for base model and I’m looking for Touring/Leather model which is harder to find deals on.
Thanks for the comment about the 30 month lease likely not available at Honda, so I’ll probably go for 36 months then.
Hi, I got a good deal at Autonation Honda of Valencia, I was upside down on my trade (about 2K in with over miles, 3 months left in lease and needed all four tires) , they took my car in for trade (not a lease return), drive off $2000 (includes taxes, lic fees, etc) $299+tax 36/12. No other dealer even came close. I went to Robertson Honda and they hit you with dealer additions for $1500 for a security GPS system they have to install because they’re located in a pretty crappy area of North Hollywood. /robertson Honda’s 1K down and $288 a month is just a bait and switch to bring you in; after dealer add ins, taxes and fees they wanted $345 a month plus tax and about $3500 drive off, that’s not even taking my old lease into consideration in the deal at all. I am now glad I waited for a good deal and am super happy with the car.
In SoCal you have a huge number of Honda dealers. You need to contact all of them and ask for their best out the door price on a Clarity. There are at least 1,000 of them out there on dealer lots. Doing this will take you some time but go to all their web sites and email their internet sales contacts. Be specific if you know colors you are willing to take. By only having two trims with zero options Honda makes this really, really easy to do.
You want to know their selling price so you can correctly calculate the lease price. MF and residual should be the same anywhere you go. See Edmunds if you don’t have those. Also tell them you want $0 drive off if you can get it.
Now the dealers will either:
Respond with numbers
Ignore you completely
Ask you “come in for a test drive”
Just forget about #2 and #3. You should end up with 8-10 quotes.
When you get the lowest price only then go to the dealer. Be prepared to walk out if they start to play games. In that case just go to the next lowest priced dealer. Plan on having this process take all weekend but you should get a the best possible deal doing things this way.
You can also take the lowest offer and shop it around to closer dealers. Sometimes you can get a match and save driving across half the county.
That is exactly what I did, I emailed a quote from a dealer 44 miles away and my closest dealer gave an outstanding deal with my trade included. I had an excel sheet going with all the prices and drive off offers in all the dealers within 50 mile radius. Time consuming but worth it to save thousands.
Touring model is crazy expensive. A lease is about $3000 more for Touring compared to Base model, about the same as if you actually purchase the car. After negotiating at five dealers for hours and hours I got:
Clarity Plugin Touring
$3500 down out the door
$279 plus tax = $307 per month
36 months / 12K miles
One reason lease is expensive is that Residual is 44% for Clarity instead of 57% for Civic for example.
I also found out that there are no extra deals that came out for Memorial Day. The lease deals (mostly for Clarity base model) came out on May 1st and were not updated at all for Memorial Day weekend. I should have waited for June 30th or September 30th or December 31st to lease (end of quarter) but we wanted the car now. We love driving around spending $0 on gas! We charge in the garage. Car is so smooth and quiet.
this is much better than what Honda is offering for the lease now… I am interested in getting this car and emailing several dealers in NorCal and asked them about the lease offer for $3000 DAS and $289/month… wonder if thats the right way to start off the negotiation
For Chapin and Lord09:
The smartest Honda Clarity Plugin lease is definitely the base model, probably $3000 cheaper. But we didn’t like the tactile feel of the base model seats (rough and scratchy in the centers of each seat) although comfort seemed fine. I love the cloth seats in my last Subaru but the Clarity cloth has some sort of scratchy eco-friendly material on part of the seats. Touring “leather trim” seats feels soft and cushy and hugs better. And in the Touring we loved the suede on the dash and all 4 doors, the base didn’t have that and didn’t look or feel nice to us in the beige interior. Also it’s not just that the base seats are manual vs. powered, maybe they don’t adjust as many ways compared to Touring power seats. Seat height and seat back adjusts in both, but for the flat seat bottom, I like to tip the front part upward and back part lower), and memory for two is nice. Also the Touring has offline Garmin Nav where I don’t need to use my phone at all, in addition to Android Auto. In the end we feel the Touring interior is really luxurious like Acura (except for the plastic wood) but I’m not sure if that plus memory seats is worth $3000 to most people.
For Odobo: My experience is that dealers will ignore any website coupon or lease deal and will tell you the Touring payment is $400 minimum even with $3K down. The ONLY way they back down is if you fully convince them that you have a low offer at another dealer by convincing them with specifics. They asked me to show them the other dealer offers but I didn’t show them any emails or numbers, but I was able to convince them to match.
Also I didn’t buy the dealer’s wear and tear package for lease return at $29/month, around $1000 total. That won’t help me if I buy out the lease or extend the lease by 4 months or longer.
Yes we got the Clarity Touring. I drive exclusively in Sport Mode now since it’s way more fun and there is so much electric range anyway. Coolest feature on the car is the adaptive cruise control, which is included standard, even in the base model. Makes highway drives so relaxing.
Also I like the Garmin Nav on the Touring model that works standalone when I don’t want to plug in my phone.
LALease – Congrats on the Clarity. How did you end up doing on the final numbers for the Touring and how much resistance did you encounter in negotiations?
I’m also curious as to how much lower other dealers are willing to go given there are still a ton of Claritys sitting on lots and whether June 30 will provide any added motivation to move inventory.
A day of casual emailing and phone calls netted the following for a Touring. The first email was an easy $3,500 discount but it seemed like the next $200 was like pulling teeth with most offering some type of resistance and some bowed out.
