i chuckle when i read “bring back (insert good deal here)”
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I’ll be honest, I miss the nicely designed cars more so than I miss the deals. Why did MB and BMW have to ruin all of their cars?!?!? BMW especially. They’re all so ugly and the interiors on all of them are worse than before, except maybe the 7 series.
Like I had an M3 allocation for sticker during Covid, and I just couldn’t bring myself to order it because I hate how it looks. Anyway, if the lease deals suck (which they do) I’ll just keep buying 911’s at sticker instead. I’ll probably pick up a newer Macan S or GTS next year as well if things don’t improve lease wise, but I’m not interested in an electric MB or BMW and I don’t want to pay an effective $750/mo+ for a base X3. That doesn’t do anything for me.
IDK if MB should be lumped in with BMW here. The epitome of MB is the S and E classes, at least to me, and the 2023s are just as elegant as any design in MB history. The only car they’ve ruined recently is the E-class wagon.
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Probably wont ever see this again barring a 2008 type financial crash. I would bet that we are seeing the lowest car prices for the next few years. Doubt that interest rates go down any time soon nor will the manufactures or dealers lower prices on their cars. Sad to say but $500+ leases and $800+ purchases are going to be the norm.
I’ve gone into depth as to why sub $400 3 series cannot and will not happen in todays world but the simplest explanation can be tied directly to what your dollar is worth today vs 4 years ago.
And I’m not talking about the fugazi inflation figures thrown out there by American Pravda. The national debt is 50% higher than it was then and is directly tied to your buying power.
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Looks like they’re getting better
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those used to be 199 jetta with tax and just 1st and dmv due at signing (~500)
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Yeah, I remember. It was $700 drive off in SoCal. But MF was also close to zero.
“Better” doesn’t always equal good, though. Like that Forte lease is ~$12k for a car that costs around 19. That’s just a terrible value.
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Too bad they won’t continue that AMG wagon 
Just a little bit of data to go behind the theme that ICE lease “badly”…
In 2021/22 MBFS was making an average $4k on each lease return when considering the positive equity between what the lease return value was vs the residual of the lease.
This is actual gain experience to the lender, which means any lessee who bought their vehicle at the end of the term is actually a $0 since the lessee would be the one to take the gain. So you can imagine the real average gain for all leased vehicles would be greater than this $4k.
Contrast this with lease returns dating back to 2018 (originated around 2016) where MBFS was losing $2k per unit and getting whacked.
Basically lessees have proven willing to pay way more than they should, and the lessors just keep dropping the resid to pocket gains since most lease returners don’t check for positive equity and just roll into a new lese.
So there’s no reasonable way an ICE lease today could compare with what people experienced 6 years ago. I think using the litmus test be to gauge a “bad lease” today is apples vs oranges if you’re comparing to what people experienced a few years ago.
something wrong with 2020-2021, wasn’t cars selling for a premium back then? Yet same profit on 2022s?
Are you looking at the total or the per-unit?
I agree, in 2022 there were only 30,000 lease returns in this data, which suggests either:
- a ton of people were buying out their leases (as seen in a significant decline of that “ratio” or
- there was a change in behavior and leases were being stretched out longer
2022 is supposed to be a full year of data for this prospectus.
Just thinking this might be a ‘please the investors’ type of report
Everything late 2020 and all of 2021 was wholesaling at Auction for MSRP, so they should be reporting higher sales than 1k - 4k profit.
then someone must be skimming off the top. There’s gotta be more profit than this. Unless they aren’t mentioning the people who weren’t paying their leases and were just waiting for repossessions.
A car can lease badly today regardless of what happened in the past. We don’t have to compare to prior leases to conclude if a lease is a bad one.
Comparing a Mercedes CPO purchase to a brand new purchase to a lease … comes down to TCO. I did this exercise in the fall.
Yeah but if you tell every person who posts an ICE lease on LeaseHackr that their lease is “bad”, then maybe this site should just be renamed CPO-Hackr or low-interest-financing-Hackr or just-buy-gently-used-Hackr.
I don’t think anyone’s going to post a lease that you believe is a good lease (other than EV).
But, if there’s some way a user could search RateFindr to find some attractive MF or Resids, it could help us find some good ICE leases. Like, what’s your recommendation for someone to get a good lease around here if that person doesn’t want a EV?
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I don’t believe in arbitrary constraints or dogma. You wanna drive a car, let’s discuss the lowest TCO of driving that particular car or what you deem an acceptable substitute.
Like I alluded IRL someone came to me about leasing an E class. I laid out the three cases (CPO, brand new finance and lease) and the numbers spoke for themselves.
If someone elects to do otherwise that’s their choice.
That announcement was already made. We are already all those things, sans URL change.
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Ok then, I guess I missed that announcement.
Every car web forum out there has “advice” on how to finance a vehicle or buy used. But what sucks about those forums is any time someone talks about leases, the threads get derailed.
Usually some tight-asses talking about how “they only buy cars to own long term” and how “leasing is for idiots.” That’s why I like LH - the folks here see the value in leases. So I feel like it’s rather dilutive for this site to become another “gently used is a smart move” forum.
Like on MB World there’s a thread in their EQS sub about leases. That thread got completely bombed by the MSRP + ADM payers who hate the concept of leases. There was almost zero useful lease advice available to any MB World user.
Anyway, as an opportunity to lean into the broad-dogma you’re describing…
There’s room for the LH owners to go the route of the Caredge.com guys, but with the added twist of strong lease support. Basically extend LH into a platform to help people get into a vehicle using using whatever financing, lease, or used/CPO means make sense for that particular buyer. Right now it’s just a message forum mess and average consumers would balk.
Like, if there’s a workflow to understand the buyer… maybe person A is someone that doesn’t want the latest and greatest … but wants a warranty to commute 12,000 miles a year. With their budget in mind, the tool shoots out some good CPO options in the price range of choice and shows a reasonable buy vs lease structure to pursue. The underlying data is already available to both LH and CarEdge.
But, if person B wants to just keep rollin’ leases for the latest and greatest feel good new models, the site would spit out vehicles in the price class of interest that have attractive resid and MF for the month.
And to your point, if people could see historical/seasonal trends they could see if the current month just kind of sucks compared to prior months and hold off.
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