Sorry for your loss.
What is the other car that you have? Can you sell it? Is it lease?
Maybe you can keep i4 instead?
OP mentioned above that they have no intention of ever selling the family car from their father. i4 is the car that needs to go.
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When you say it’s in your name, do you mean that you are the lessee on the contract with BMW? Because if he simply “left the car” to you but you’re not on the lease contract, you’re not on the hook. Perhaps your father’s estate is liable though. Either way, contacting a lawyer will give you an answer, and for a lot less money and worry.
You don’t really need a reputable company in the sense that they won’t do any vetting for you anyway. That’s what BMWFS is for.
You just need to advertise the availability of the car with photos, description and the incentive.
Here at Private Transfers
Swapalease dot com
Craigslist
Facebook marketplace (lots of useless messages IME)
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The BMW is not the car left to OP. If I’ve learned anything from this thread it’s reading is hard.
OP sorry for your loss. Gonna be tough to get out of this one.
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The i4 is the OP’s personal car. The BMWFS contract is in her name. The i4 is completely unrelated to the car that her father left her.
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@MeekasMom Extremely sorry for your loss.
Whats the remaining mileage allowance on your i4 lease ? That is a very important factor for anyone to consider before taking on your lease. As others have already pointed out about your payment being really high, offering a hefty incentive may or may not work out.
If you dont mind sharing, what is the other car family car that you have inherited from your parents ? (Year make model). I completely understand the importance of that car for you but depending on the age and importance, maybe you may want to preserve that car for a long time ? If thats a case and financially no issues, may be just finish up your i4 lease instead of handing out free money to strangers.
I have a 3 year lease, 36k miles. I am at 31k now, so whoever takes it over will only have 5k miles for the remaining months (lease is up July 2026).
The car my father left me is a Mercedes eClass, 2018 in pristine condition. Like I said, it was my mother’s beloved car so I have no intention of selling it.
Totally understand what you are saying. Financially I have no problem with the BMW lease payments, so unless I can get to a place where I am forking out no more than $5k, I will just finish out the lease. Just wanted to make sure I was looking at all options.
Again very sorry for your loss. Pragmatic advice to follow.
Looking at it from a transferee POV: you should have a bit more then 13-14k miles left on the lease, and at .23 cents per mile on prepayment, someone is going to want those miles to be compensated for on the lease on top of an incentive to make the payment more palatable.
So even if you parked the benz and kept driving the i4 you’re going to be over and forking out probably 2500 in overage fees (off the top of my head) at BMW lease end. your payment being rough in this market besides, you’d have a very hard time transferring this.
Your options to me seem very limited - you can’t sell the car to someone, you can’t transfer the obligation, seems to me the best route would be to drive it out ‘park’ the benz (drive it still though) for the sentimental value and drive it after the i4 goes back.
You’re either going to spend 14k to return it now, 12k in payments + overage at lease end, or at the minimum part with probably a 4000-6000 incentive on the lowest end to transfer it.
I got to that last number by valuing the lease at 400-500/m for the car itself on the higher end on SwapALease - the incentive to effectively get to that number, plus buying miles for a transferee for them to be able to feasibly driving it.
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Exactly! Make one your weekend/special occasion car but don’t let MBZ sit undriven - they don’t like it! Or mix and match driving the two for two reasons:
1 - your BMW insurance should drop with less driving
2 - keep your BMW mileage within allowance as much as possible - don’t want to pay overage on top of everything else.
You can try to transfer BMW again with 7-9 months left (BMW cannot be transferred in the last 6). Heavy incentive will be required but who knows where the market will be if tariffs are implemented.
PS: the only possible consideration for driving i4 more is if you use free EA charging vs paying CA gas prices.
You nailed my options: “You’re either going to spend 14k to return it now, 12k in payments + overage at lease end, or at the minimum part with probably a 4000-6000 incentive on the lowest end to transfer it”. Thank you.
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yes, I pretty much drive the MBZ on weekends, just to keep it from not sitting. Will mix it up more to keep the BMW mileage down and looks like I will be keeping it until lease end. Then I will have more options for another EV - probably Porsche Taycan or Macan Electric, but I will able to start from a clean slate and pricing will hopefully be better.
Best of luck, I’d lean a little bit more on it, keep the fluids moving and the rubber from sitting, and you should be fine.
thanks so much.
Maybe the Porsche 718 Cayman and Boxster EVs will be available by then too.
Yes and they’ll be 1500+/month 
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The Taycan isn’t much cheaper though, is it? Even the cheaper Macan EV is over $1000/month.
I was considering getting a Macan EV but ended up getting a BMW iX instead, since the lease offers were significantly better for the BMW.
You’re right it’s not. I have an iX too after two taycans.
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Might be too far underwater but did you try getting a quote from driveway? They should be able to route it through one of their bmw dealerships.
They’re still going to be ridiculously underwater. Payoff at 43k, best case even if that includes tax it is still gonna be like 39k, which I’m guessing is going to be well underwater.
OP should also try equity hackr and see what the damage there is like as well.