I’ve purchased quite a few used cars before. This was my first new car/lease.
The dealership was rather underhanded and made at least two errors in their favor during negotiation/lease signing. I also had to bicker back and forth a bit to get them to remove an additional charge of $600 for VIN etching immediately after placing my deposit in March.
The first error they made was using the Corporate Sales Program $750 discount to match a $1,500 dealer discount I had elsewhere, effectively providing a $750 dealer discount before I caught it. The second was that they “forgot” to apply to the lease the $1,000 deposit I made in March when I ordered the vehicle. I eventually caught that too and had that money refunded.
I’m hoping the experts here can review the contract (pdf, 2.0 MB) and see if there was anything I missed. The monthly payment ended up being about $50/month more than I was initially quoted when I reserved the vehicle in March; I’m not sure whether was due to an initial underestimate when I ordered the vehicle or additional charges they managed to get into the contract.
To summarize, I negotiated a $1,500 dealer discount and had a $750 discount through the Corporate Sales Program for a total discount of $2,250. Is the contract consistent with those discounts without any additional charges that shouldn’t be there?
Thanks!
Edit -
Here’s the info from the window sticker:
MSRP Base $74,900
Tanzanite Blue II Metallic $1,950
Ivory White/Night Blue Merino $5,150
Cold Weather Package $1,100
Drivers Assistance Pro Pkg $1,700
Luxury Seating Package $1,600
Parking Assistance Package $800
Executive Package $3,200
22" Wheels $1,300
M Sport Brakes w/ Blue Calipers $650
Spacesaver spare $150
Aluminum Running Boards $400
Captain Chairs $850.00
Individual Fine Wood Ash Grain $1,080
Anthracite Alcantara Headliner $1,000
Destination $995
MSRP Total $96,825
90% sure they didn’t make the mistakes in their favor. Sure, mistakes happen, but most of the time , in my opinion, its not the case. They guys sell cars for a living, day and day out. Mistakes are rare, and even then only in their favor is very suspicious.
Why didn’t you just finance? You’re paying 1750/mo effective or 63k over 36 mo.
When you factor in rent charge and liquidity/liability benefits of leasing , you’re essentially making the assumption the car will be worth roughly 40k or less in 3 years with 36k miles, which seems unlikely.
You could make this same monthly payment and own the car after 5 years.
There is nothing that suspicious or nefarious or anything like that with this.
Getting them to remove an add-on and correctly apply the discount and incentive? Just typical new car negotiations.
And with advance deposits, you often have to work with the dealer to make sure it’s correctly applied at signing. This is rarely the dealer out to “get you” but rather just miscommunications between sales/finance, things get lost in the mix, they simply forget, etc.
Constructive criticism OP, but the fact that you signed this garbage and didn’t realize till after the fact that the deposit wasn’t applied tells us everything we need to know here Enjoy the car, but next time ask first.
Congrats on the car.
The lease program for this vehicle is just not great.
It seems like the sales use/tax (and acquisition fee) is calculated on the depreciation, and added to the Gross Cap Cost of the vehicle. Is this normal? I thought tax was calculated on monthly depreciation + rent charge?
And is that 10% sales tax? Is that normal?
I wasn’t confident about wanting to keep the car for more than three years.
I wanted to test the waters with a lease to see how it would affect my income tax calculations.
Related to #1, Illinois changed the law a few years back limiting sales tax trade-in credit to the first $10k of a used vehicle’s trade-in value. This tilts the equation towards leasing if you’re not planning to keep the car long-term. I realized later that this change was reversed as of earlier this year, so it was a mistake for me to factor this in.
Can you talk more about the liquidity/liability benefits you’re referring to?
Enjoy the car, but next time ask first.