Signed this deal on the last day of February. Loaner with 5000 miles. In my preferred color and in my city (I was prepping to fly for a different deal when this one came together).
MSRP was $82,235. Negotiated sales price (with $887 in dealer adds) was $71,861. I may have left a little money on the table but I’m happy with the deal.
They didn’t buy the existing miles which is why the mileage allowed is a smidge over 10k per year. My understanding is that we structured it as a 12k but didn’t buy the miles.
Incentives (February programs):
$2,000 Conquest
$1,250 Costco Executive
$500 GM Card Signup and Spend
Texas so full taxes up front, but these were essentially negated with lender credits and trade-in value.
Did a one-pay with a trade-in valued at $27,000. Payoff on the trade was $7,793.71, but to avoid negative depreciation the dealer told me they had to reduce the trade-in allowance by $4k then inflate the payoff by that same amount. This makes my brain hurt now that I revisit the contract, since I’m having trouble getting the calculator to match what I paid.
In the end I applied ~$20k in trade-in equity and paid another $9k cash. I preferred a 36 month term over 24 where a lot of these deals seem to land. Not sure if I’m calculating that one-pay amount properly but $28,794 is about what I paid including the trade equity, even though the contract says $32k (presumably from the inflated trade payoff).
The reason for this is that when there’s a hefty incentive stack it often makes a lot more sense financially (effective payment) to choose 24 over 36. When I started out here I didn’t like to shop every two years, but we have been for this reason.
My first concern is that you didn’t get a fair price for your trade, but perhaps you got several other offers from Carmax et al and this one was best.
With respect to the trade, I got an in-person Carmax offer for 29k, which allowed me to negotiate up from the dealer’s initial offer of 23k. Based on my rough back of the napkin math I would have needed to be at 27.5k trade-in value to break even on the taxes, and I was OK settling at 27k to avoid another hour’s worth of driving back and forth to Carmax especially with the logistics of trying to get picked up when I have small children at home and I value my time higher than the $500 difference.
The one-pay for 24 months was approx. $21,500 so an extra 12 months for 7k ($583/month-ish) seemed decent at the time. I like the car a lot and who knows if there will still be inflated EV residuals in 2-3 years, so this way at least I get 3 years of fun driving in a car I like.
Now if only Cadillac could fix the headrests in the third row not folding down early enough such that they strike the second row seats (design flaw); this car would be perfect lol.
I wish I’d done a longer term on the Audi I returned last year; it wasn’t that much more per month (effective) to do 36. I loved the car and couldn’t replace it for anywhere close to what I’d been paying.
My understanding of the lender tax credits was that they were only for half of the tax, so the trade let me negate the rest of it. But I could never find the exact details of the lender credits through RateFindr or elsewhere to independently verify. That does alter the math though and to be honest I didn’t work out the exact difference it would have made had I only applied a portion of the trade-in value or sold it to Carmax. I had spent the week negotiating all over the state and this deal came together at my preferred dealer (known for post-sales service). I was ready to be done knowing I was giving a bit to the dealership for their trouble and so I could take advantage of their service later on (free car washes, etc.). It was also difficult to know exactly what amount was being taxed; initially I had them show me quotes based on me taking all of my equity as cash (even though I didn’t end up doing that), and due a last minute term change, the initial lease agreement had the wrong residual (and I had to leave to get my kids) so I came back the following day to finalize the deal. A bit lazy on my part but at some point my time becomes more valuable than squeezing every last drop out of the lemon.
I do wish Texas taxed like other states though; it makes it very difficult to compare deals based on the top-line number.
For one thing, TX charges sales tax on the full selling price of the car, so even with two identical deals on the car itself, the TX lease is going to be noticeably more expensive than the CA lease.
You can only compare deals from other states pre-tax since each state taxes leases differently. And even then, the market can vary from state to state.
Yeah Texas is unique in that regard although in my case with lender tax credits and trade in offset I’m wondering if my one-pay number is the correct pre-tax number to compare to?
depending on driving habits, you may find that 12k or 15k would have been the better choice given you already had 5k clocked (unless GM policy has changed)
We structured as a 12k but since they didn’t buy the existing miles on paper that’s about 10.3k remaining per year. They were the only dealer that wasn’t going to buy the miles so maybe that was a profit squeeze but I don’t know for sure.
Trism has a great tip here. I had been closely following my preferred local chain of dealerships who also listed each as “dealer demo,” and then as I expanded my search I just looked for cars with big discounts as that’s really the only reason why they would be marked down. Sometimes the dealer would have the “courtesy transportation” icon, sometimes they wouldn’t.
For me personally, once I expressed interest in a loaner with a specific color combination, my dealer pulled one from their loan pool so I ended up with a car I would have never found online. Never hurts to ask though it gets annoying when talking to 10 different dealerships with varying levels of annoying sales behavior.
In other words, the existing loaner miles didn’t count against your allocation. On a 10k/24, you could return the vehicle with 25k miles since it already had 5k clocked
This dealer was the odd man out in my scenario. They didn’t “buy the miles” so my paperwork lists the car as starting with odometer 5054 and the excess wear charge kicks in after 10316 miles per year. 3*10316 + 5054 loaner miles = 36k total. Now that we’re discussing it I’m a little confused but the way I’m reading it the odometer has to read more than 36k total at lease end for me to owe an excess mileage charge? Can anyone verify if that’s correct? My contract is linked above.
Prior threads on GM loaners are a little confusing, and my contract lists existing miles but doesn’t explicitly relate them to the excess mileage section.
My expectation was a 10k mile/year lease when I negotiated it; I just want to make sure I didn’t get taken advantage of since a lot of other dealers I talked to did buy the miles. I may lease a Lyriq from the same dealer soon so I’d like to clear that up beforehand.
