Now that I’ve moved on from my C63, I can post a full retrospective financial analysis of my decision to purchase vs. lease.
I did a European Delivery in order to get a custom spec and an easy discount. All in, it looks like my effective payment was $871 with $871 DAS on a custom ordered C63 coupe. Comparable lease quotes were in the $1,200 range with 8K in MSD’s and 2K DAS at the time so I’m pretty happy.
On top of that, I was able to get a free hotel night, museum tour, and a free rental for 2 weeks while driving around Champagne and Burgundy… all in all, not a bad deal!
Thanks for the data. Just to make it easier to read, can you add the selling price and the amount you sold it for used? Private party, carvana/et, or trade-in? What was the mileage?
Seems like real world resale is about MBFS residuals.
Amg residuals… well the 63 amg’s residuals are usually so realistic its very feasible to come out with some positive equity… though this usually makes for a bad lease in theory.
Yeah, understand that, thanks. Depends on if there are lease specific incentives that you can’t get close to with purchase, and then of course how difficult MBFS makes it for third-party buyouts. If it’s close I’d still choose the lease due to the protection I have if the car gets damaged, or resale values crash in general.
I’m with you on that, saving 200-300/mo is worth it imo, any type of damage shows up on your carfax and your value is usually tanked for these specialty vars.
Not to mention ease of turn in, and not dealing with trade in values, private party value, etc etc
Selling price of $66K
Sold to CarMax for $62K (might have been able to get $64-65K PP)
Buyout was ~$57.3K
Mileage at sale was ~7K [thanks COVID - although I did get one last long road trip with it before sale]
However, I did lose a key and there was minor cosmetic damage on the front end so that may have depressed selling price a bit.
On an interesting note, I saw CarMax list it around ~67K and it’s already gone… used buyer paid more than I did new.
A 14.8% discount is almost unreal on a '63, do you remember what the MF and RV were? Must have been especially awful to get payments in the $1200’s with a selling price of $66k.
Also how did you manage to keep the car for 22 months but only make 18 payments?
I know it’s a purchase, I’m curious if the OP remembers what the lease programs looked like back then to get such a high payment in spite of such a great discount.
So the discount was a bit of a unicorn, I did the European Delivery program which gives you a set 5% off MSRP and waived delivery fee, so effectively a 7% discount.
I stuck it out with one well known ED sales rep who moved dealerships and followed him so (causing me to take a 6 month delay) so he gave me an additional ~5% off. The dealer then had a mishap with their finance department and not locking my rate (causing my APR to go up by ~1%) so they gave an additional $1K discount.
I was comparing to the SoCal quotes which were all around 1.2K/month, with paltry discounts of 3-5%. I think I might have been able to lease this specific car for around ~$1,050, because they bump up MF for ED. I chose purchase because the MF was high compared to the APR and I didn’t want to pay acquisition fees.
MBFS offered me an interest free COVID deferral for 4 months. I didn’t need it but was happy to keep the cash on hand given the uncertainty and my existing positive equity in the car.
