In case we missed it, what’s your trade?
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In addition to what @max_g said, you may wish to get other offers for your trade in since the the MB dealer might be short changing you on the trade in to make the discount on the new car seem better than it actually is.
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Consider he’s getting 8k on it prob a Honda civic
This is why people should be aware of the difference between the purchase tax credit and the lease incentive, which is just a discount from MBFS and has nothing to do with your taxes. If you buy a car with the tax credit, it doesn’t factor into your negotiation with the dealer because it has nothing to do with them or the OEM. The lease incentive is a discount that the finance company is giving you, maybe they are also getting a tax credit on their end but that has nothing to do with you. They could say you get the incentive, but only on an inflated MF, or say it doesn’t stack, or just raise the price of the car to compensate.
So by all means, take the incentive into consideration when comparing numbers, like any other incentive, but saying that you are considering the 450e for the 7500 incentive is a bit silly, because it looks like they just made the car more expensive in other ways.
My trade in is a 2011 Acura MDX with about 114k miles. I am the only owner. CarMax values it at about $6600 so the $8k the dealer was offering is more than I thought I would get.
Another dealer was going to offer me only $6k.
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You may want to spend an hour getting additional quotes from other car buying services
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Bethesda? Good luck.
Just out of curiosity why don’t you want a BEV?
We already have an all-electric vehicle. I have family out of state that would require a planned stop to recharge. It’s doable but not optimal. We don’t have access to a level 2 charger at our family’s house. Granted, we could use the normal outlet, but that would take a long time to get to a full charge.
Thank you for the link to other car buying services. I got a huge range of quotations - from just under $5000 to $8700. The dealer was willing to give me $8000 and potentially even more if I would buy his car that’s sitting in the lot.
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Outstanding. Now you know you have an $8700 offer on your trade if you find a build you want elsewhere.
Late to the party but getting ready to pick up a GLE450e in California in late January or early February. I ordered the car (had specific options preferences that I couldn’t find in one vehicle) and MSRP is $87,230.
I’d like to save as much money as possible. Sounds like the lease then buy option should be considered but I’m a total noob, never leased a car and am not sure how to go about figuring this out.
Can someone walk me through this? And if you go down this path, does it matter what the lease payments are considering you intend to buy out asap? And should you max your down payment to minimize buy out financing costs if you can (and what’s the largest downpayment they’d accept)? And does it matter whether you do a 10k, 12k or 15k lease or even how many years you sign up for if you intend to buy out early?
Appreciate the help here.
Hi Mike - I am the original poster and wanted to give everyone an update and also let you know what I considered in order to pay for my car.
After back and forth with the dealer, contacting other dealers, and viewing the options I had on LH, I opted to custom order the GLE 450e for a lower sticker price (the models off the lot did but have some of the options I wanted, like 4-zone climate control).
I looked into various payment options like multi-year leases, lease to own, financing, one-pay leases, and all cash. My ultimate goal at the end of the day was to own the car outright. I don’t want to get a new car after 1-2 years (my current car is 13 years old).
Ultimately, it was cheapest for me to pay all cash, including a trade-in worth about $8k.
The local dealer had a car on the lot with a $81k MSRP that he was able to get down to about $70k, but the residual I would have to pay (after a lease or financing deal) would have been more than my custom build. For what it’s worth, I was NOT able to take advantage of the $7500 EV credit because it only applies to leases.
So what I learned as a newbie is that if you want to own the car, all-cash is a good solution. However, if you are ok getting a new vehicle every few years, then leasing is potentially a better option.
Hope this helps!
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Thanks for this info! Did you explore the scenario that Mike wants to do where he enters into a lease to get the $7,500 EV rebate, but then immediately buy out the lease (presumably after the first month).
In a nutshell you negotiate to get the lowest selling price (“agreed upon value”) on the lease.
So your immediate buyout of the lease will be selling price less rebate plus $1,095 acq fee.
Plus TTL obviously
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I will - production begins the first week of January. I hope to have it by the end of that month!
I sure did - it was still more expensive to do the lease option, even with the $7500 EV credit. Of all the lease options, the one-pay lease was the cheapest. But, it was still more than the all-cash alternative.
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Huh that’s really interesting. You can tell from the posts on LH (and the most recent one from Max) that the presumption is the lease-then-immediate-buyout approach is cheapest to capture the $7,500 EV credit.
But maybe MBFS is paying some folks to figure out how to pocket that $7,500 to the lender; so it’s like fool’s gold to do the lease-buyout.
Not sure which scenarios you were comparing, presumably the leasing scenario involved riding the lease and buying at RV at the end?
We are talking about paying off the lease within the first month. There’s no way paying cash on day one is cheaper than leasing followed by all cash on day <30