A hacked lease is what this site is all about. It’s a lease so cheap that even successive leases are cheaper than purchasing and trying to accumulate equity over, say, six years.
Take a Mercedes EV for example. Someone paid $400/m in 2022, returned it and leased another in 2025 for $500/m. So it cost them around $30k over the course of six years but the car depreciated by $50k+. So they came out well ahead.
What are the typical pre-requisites for a hacked lease like that?
Huge gap between cost and sticker: potential for huge discounts.
Few purchasers: so big incentives from OEM, plus favorable RV/MF combination to entice leases
Huge real world depreciation, hence the few purchasers
That dynamic doesn’t exist in the meat of the ICEV market and cannot exist. It simply isn’t possible because there’s not that much meat on the bone between cost and sticker on an Elantra or Camry or RAV4 or Palisade.
Lease hacking began as a luxury car game and is now mostly an EV game. It just isn’t possible in segments where those pre-requisites don’t exist.