I’ll start off by saying this: the deal wouldn’t have been possible without @IvanAudi who works at Rusnak Audi of Pasadena. He was super transparent and had an earnest desire to be upfront with all costs. Most enjoyable car experience I’ve had to date.
I’ve been following the forums for about 3 years, but have never posted. Used everything I learned here to lease a fully-loaded Kia Optima Hybrid EX two years ago for $208/month that has served me well. As the end of my 24 month lease is approaching though, I knew it was time for an upgrade…
Everyone says Audi’s lease poorly so I took it on as a challenge. After some research, I found that it could be possible to do something reasonable for the car I wanted. I made my decisions based on going for the highest value adds and foregoing the gimmicks or upgrades that would add a lot of cost but not of great value to my experience of the car. Stats below:
2018 Audi A4 - Premium Plus Ultra
MSRP: $41,050
Adjusted Cap Cost: $32,054
Monthly Payment: $368.45
Drive Off: $1800 (Lic/Reg, upfront taxes)
MSD’s: 10 = $3750
Incentives: $3000 (2k Audi Lease Cash + 1k Loyalty)
Months: 36
Miles 12,000
MF: .00031
Residual: 52%
Region: SoCal
Leasehackr Score: 10 years
Couple of general things to note:
- @IvanAudi was excellent to work with. If you want to consider an Audi in LA, its basically not even worth talking to anyone else.
- You MUST be very prepared before going in for a deal. Understand what every number means and what you expect it to be. I had all my spreadsheets set up and prepped with the numbers I expected to get and straight up pulled my laptop out during our conversations. This saved me multiple times during our negotiation.
- Although the salesman might be upfront, the finance manager has the luxury of being the man behind the curtain and doesn’t have to worry about his relationship with you, so he may intentionally or unintentionally skew the numbers to make the deal slightly more favorable for them. Check every number and advocate for yourself if they try to “round” a number up or slightly change something without legitimate explanation.
- This deal may actually not be replicable because after agreeing to our final costs, we learned several things that changed the numbers significantly (see below), but Ivan worked to honor the deal as best as possible because of the mix up.
Things we learned in the process:
- Check Incentive fine print: Originally, I was expecting $4000 in incentives
- $2000 Audi Lease Cash (for May, not sure what it is in June)
- $1000 Audi Loyalty (my roommate has an Audi, just has to be the same household)
- $1000 Audi Sedan Loyalty (again my roommate) - However, this did not end up applying because the fine print here said it only applied if it was the same person, not just same household.
So, my incentives actually dropped to $3000, which made a big impact on monthly payment. Ivan worked with the Sales Manager to essentially split the difference with me to honor the numbers we had already agreed upon.
-
MSD’s are rounded to the nearest $25 increment (in the fine print)
I put max 10 MSDs down because it reduced my MF from .00081 to .00031. That took exactly $30 off per month. But just a small note: The MSD is rounded to the nearest $25 increment, so even though my monthly worked out to $368, 1 Security Deposit = $375. Just an FYI, but good to know so that you aren’t confused by the number (as we were). Sales Manager actually didn’t know this and we had to look it up in the Audi Financial doc to see why the number was off. I don’t think MSDs are very common. When I went to actually go sign the paperwork, the sales manager actually told me that he couldn’t input 10 MSDs, that the system would only let him input 9; but again he honored the numbers we had already agreed upon. -
Built-in Nav + Virtual Cockpit are low-value gimmicks.
I opted for the Premium Plus Package because there were a lot of great upgrades and I just really liked the 18" two-tone wheels. However, adding the nav is worthless if you have an iphone because the Premium + comes with Apple Airplay so your nav on your phone automatically gets displayed onto the Audi screen. They’ve basically bundled the virtual cockpit with nav to lure people into still opting for the nav package, but adding this will kill your deal.
I think I did well, knowing that this was the only car I wanted to consider and it looks so good and drives so damn well (compared to my Kia, at least 
)
Good to know.