Year, Make, Model, and Trim: 2019 RAM 1500 Laramie Longhorn V8 4x4
MSRP: $67,500
Monthly Payment: $607 (Or so I thought. In non-Texas states, I think the pre-tax payment would be like $545?)
Drive-Off Amount: $607 (first payment)
Months: 39
Annual Mileage: 12000
MF: 0.00235% (effectively 0.00 MF)
Residual: 43.19%
Incentives: $14,100
Region: TEXAS (land of the sales tax on full price of the car)
Leasehackr Score: ~9.5 if I recall
Leasehackr Calculator Link: It doesn’t handle Texas calculations well, so I won’t bother you with it.
So this was a weird one. Full disclosure: I write long rambling stories. Found a truck I liked. Seemed to be a demo that wasn’t advertised as a demo. Mileage wasn’t posted on the dealer’s website, but I think I found it somewhere else. So I emailed and texted back and forth on New Year’s Eve. Got a photo of a sheet (I’m looking at it again now) showing
$67595 MSRP
$8,611 discount
$5500 rebates
$29,196 residual
0.00235% rate (not money factor)
39 months, 12,000 miles
$595 acquisition
$150 fees
DAS $735.17
$735.17/mo
The terms weren’t at all what I was expecting, (obviously low MF), but I figured he had some third party bank with wacky IDL incentives to play with the MF/RV. It was late on NYE so I said cool let’s pick it up after the holiday.
Made an appointment and went in Thursday morning. We went for a test drive, I asked again about the mileage (he hadn’t addressed my previous question via text/email). He said yeah it’s a demo, and we do big discounts on demos. I said yeah that’s why I’m interested in leasing this truck. I let them appraise my car but made it clear that they can buy it if the price is right, but I don’t want it to be a cap reduction.
We get back and sit down. He says this is the price. I say bro this is the price advertised on the RAM corporate website. This is just “employee pricing for all” and the advertised rebates. Surely there’s some additional dealer discount, and that’s before we even take the 4,000 miles of demo service into account. He acts shocked and asks, “What do you mean, it’s not a demo? It has miles. We’ll knock off 25¢ per mile.” Then he shows me a new sheet that was like $685, which included a $12,000 trade in value for my car. I was so confused.
I don’t want to trade my car. I don’t want to put anything down. I don’t want to pay the retail list price for a 2-year-old truck that spent the last 9 months as a service loaner. I feel like I’m taking crazy pills. He thought I was taking crazy pills. We got to I think $3k in dealer discounts. I was looking for $7900 in dealer discounts after the advertised discounts and rebates. Using the numbers he gave me, I wanted a $540 payment (which I now recognize was…bold). We were too far apart, and they weren’t conceding that they were trying to sell me a used car for the price of a new car (granted, like 25% off MSRP, but that’s the way these fancy luxury trucks do). So I agreed to disagree and left.
I still wanted the truck, and I thought there was still a path to get there. We went back and forth via text. I asked for $2000 more + $2000 more on my car (again, not applying the trade to the lease, but just getting it to match other offers so I could throw in the tax savings). He gave me $1500 + $500 on the “trade.”
At this point, I wasn’t where I wanted to be, but it was the end of the day on the last day of the month’s incentive program, and it sounded like it was as far as they could go to move the unit. So I started packing up my things to head down there. He hasn’t given me an updated worksheet, but by my calculations, with a $4500 discount, we were at $607/mo. I reached out one more time and asked if we could get to $595 and said I’d fill out a credit app online and head down there ASAP.
His response: “No I can’t we’re still too far away. Monthly we’re still in the 7’s.”
What. We were in the $700s when we started this conversation three days and $4500 ago. What the hell happened?
I ran all the same numbers he gave me and my results looked correct. It was late and I just wasn’t going to argue with a guy who clearly had very little incentive to close the deal and seemingly didn’t feel like asking the manager for the updated numbers for me anymore. So I said “that’s weird” and I bid him a good evening, and I didn’t buy a ridiculously expensive truck. But it still bothers me.
I guess my questions to you fine hackrs would be: What was I missing about this demo-that’s-not-a-demo? He told me it was a manager demo that just wasn’t “processed.” It had been on the lot for 9 months and had 4,000 miles on it. Was I wrong to expect about $8k off of a $67k truck in that scenario, in addition to the factory incentives?
All I can figure is that he wasn’t telling me the whole story. That he gave me the wrong numbers in the beginning. Or that those numbers already included a hidden dealer discount in the form of a discounted MF and/or inflated residual. And then when he said he was giving me another $4500, that required a reset to the standard Chrysler capital terms, which were not in my favor (I now think this is exactly what happened; that the original lease sheet already, in fact, had factored in a $4500 discount on the base terms without saying so). Or maybe the dealer had screwed up and hadn’t reported the truck as a demo to RAM, so they hadn’t gotten their demo kickbacks from corporate and now didn’t know how to sell it. I don’t know.
I’m not lamenting this as the one that got away or anything. I was trying to impulse buy an FCA product, so all’s we’ll that ends well, right? I’m just wondering where I really went wrong in my expectation, and how in the world we could have reached the conclusion we did, with a price that hasn’t changed despite a $4500 discount. This was a weird one.
TL;DR: Salesman gave me an initial term sheet with a $700 payment based on advertised price. Gave me $4500 in discounts once I convinced him it was a demo. Then gave me a final offer of $700/mo.