Link to calculator above.
I finally got this deal over the line. I’d been trying to hack a Cadillac Lyriq deal for a long time, but I went home empty-handed last month when I thought that the dealers would be super-incentivized to make a deal. It turns out that the joke was on us. GM had a strategy to stretch out the EV tax credit past the September 30th expiration date, but they only told their cabal of dealers the insider information and withheld it from consumers. When I tried to get pricing and saw that no dealer was budging off their numbers, I suspected that something was amiss. So I pulled the plug and waited for this month. It’s a good thing, too, because I got an amazing deal. It turns out that this month (October) that GM barely knocked back the residuals that were ostensibly propped up by the use of the outgoing Federal EV tax credit. The residual on the AWD Lyriq only dropped from 74% (September) to 72% (October) after the loss of government support, but GM made $6,000 in cash available to dealers directly to further subsidize the residual. So it’s like I’m double-dipping on the subsidized residual. The residual on my deal was north of 82% because they took the residual value of the unit as calculated by the Leasehackr calculator and manually juiced it by adding $6000 to it! The dealers were told by GM to manually change the residual by adding in the $6000 of free cash available from GM only for this month.
Here’s a link explaining how this works:
The deal includes $5500 of rebates from GM. These include:
3000 Retired Courtesy Car
2000 EV Conquest
500 GM Card sign up
Also, if you’re trying to copy the deal you need to target AWD demo cars. These lease better because the MF is lower while still having a high residual. Of course, I don’t need the AWD in Texas because it rarely snows, but it saves a bundle on the lease payment.
The dealer offered buy rate for the money factor with their first offer, which showed that they were serious about doing a good deal. I didn’t have to fight them about this. And in Texas you really need a tax credit to get a great lease deal. Luckily GM financial had authorized partial tax credits on EVs this month. Instead of paying 6.25% on the entire sales price (ouch!), I only had to pay 3.25% because 3% of the tax was subsidized with the tax credit.
The discount on the car is OK at around 8.5% but not amazing. I could have asked for up to about 10.5 or 11% but then there would have been no profit for the dealer. It’s fair for the dealer to make enough to pay out commissions for the agents, right? So there’s still about 2K in this deal that the dealer is taking home. If you really want to turn the screws you could fight over that if you’re trying to replicate this deal.
The deal is structured as a one-pay lease to drive the MF even lower, because GM offers a .00042 discount for paying everything up front. GM also waives acquisition fee for their leases. There is no capital cost reduction or down payment that I offered. The only other thing that stings is that there were 806 dollars worth of doc fees which is principally a result of the $600 registration fee during the first two years of ownership that Texas charges for electric vehicles since they don’t get gas tax revenue from them.
Here’s the interesting part about how the deal is structured and financed: The one-pay for this deal is $6588.42 for a 24 month 10k mile lease. It’s almost exactly the amount of the Texas Light-Vehicle Electric Vehicle Grant (1666) plus the 5000 that I’m permitted to put on the GM card. So when I signed, I put 5,000 dollars on the GM card with a nine month interest free term and I paid 1,588 out of pocket. However, I will get that money back right away (in 2-3 months) from the state of Texas from their electric vehicle grant program. (The EV grant authorizes up to $2500, but you only get the full amount if you take out a three year lease or longer.) Since this is only a two year lease, I qualify for only 2/3 of the 2500. Once the 1,588 cancels out with the grant money then I’m only on the hook in nine months with no interest for the remainder of the balloon payment of 5K.
In short, I scored a $5,000 dollar one-pay lease for a 65K Cadillac with nothing up front and interest free for 9 months, too! This comes out to $205 per month after the post-sale rebate is taken into account.
One more thing for everybody who wants to know the name of the dealer: they are out of demo cars and would be unable to replicate the deal. My suggestion is to go to the Cadillac website and search inventory of dealers near you that still have AWD demo cars available. I posted this today right after signing to allow you guys to hustle in the next two days to get a deal over the line. I targeted this same dealer last month and got crickets when I made them a low-ball offer similar to this one. Obviously, the situation changed significantly and they are much more motivated to do deals this month.
Follow his tip: Best way to present an offer to a dealership? - #39 by Boater71