It sucks but the captive can do as they please with their vehicles. We’re just renting it.
Find an Audi or VW dealer who’s willing to deal for your car. Their buyout should be the same as yours less taxes.
This is correct. I sold my Atlas to a VW dealer for my buyout amount.They gave me $1K less than CarMax, but better than nothing.
VW credit quoted CarMax $4K more than my buyout amount 
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An update on an Audi lease that I sold to a dealer after exploring Carvana/Vroom:
3rd party payoff on my car was about $8500 over my payoff, and I didn’t want to buy the car and risk taking a tax hit by flipping it to them, even though it wasn’t clear I would have any in my state. Set the market rate with offers from Carvana/Vroom and took it to 5 different Audi dealers. One finally bit after getting lowballed by several and I sold it to them a day before my lease turn-in and netted ~$10k minus the $495 disposition fee. Audi dealer payoff was the same as mine, and everyone left happy. This nearly halved my cost basis on the lease, so maybe it’ll make the pain of whatever garbage deal I’m going to have to sign next a little easier to bear, but I doubt it.
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Hi John,
I wish we saw your tips two months earlier. We are currently in this situation, and we paid $2800 out of pocket for this lesson. We had a Audi Q7 lease expiring December 2021. In July, we decided to trade it in with Sheehy Toyota of Laurel. We took the pay off quote that we requested from Audi FS, thinking it was a good payoff number. I dont believe private payoff quote and dealer pay off quote is a common knowledge. This is our first leased vehicle, but 5th car so we went through trade in process multiple times. We provided dealer with payoff quote, and all dealers we traded in with did the due diligence of calling the other financial party (in this case, Audi FS) to confirm payoff amount. Sheehy Toyota did not call Audi, even though we reminded them couple times day of trade in, they later claimed “they trust their clients’ word”. Since early July, I’ve been dealing with Audi FS and Sheehy Toyota to get my account cleared. We learned dealer payoff amount is different, $2800 more than the quote we received. I had to call Audi FS and Sheehy Toyota, who refused to pay the shortage, to coordinate sending in the payoff shortage. I ended up paying out of pocket, Audi FS confirmed they received the shortage on 8/20 and will apply to my account in 17 days. To date (9/20/2021), I am still waiting for Audi to clear my outstanding balance on the account. AND they reported me as delinquent to credit bureaus resulting in 50 points taken off from my credit score.
I hope no one else has to go through what I’m going through right now. And avoid unethical dealerships at all cost.
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What dealership are you at? Trying to sell my Audi
424-281-5606
Went to an Audi dealer for 20k service for Etron and figured I’d get an offer on my car. Audis pay off was 42k and third party buyout was 58k. Crazy. Their offer was significantly lower than Autonation, which will have same buyout as Audi so will likely go with them.