I leased my 2020 Chevy Bolt from GM Financial on their great one-pay deal. When the lease expires I am considering buying the car ($22K), but I don’t know if the used car EV tax incentives will apply for Fed or CA. when buying out of a lease. Can anyone tell me what to expect and how I should approach this?
Here’s a link to the IRS page: https://www.irs.gov/credits-deductions/used-clean-vehicle-credit.
To qualify, you must:
- Be an individual who bought the vehicle for use and not for resale
- Not be the original owner
- Not be claimed as a dependent on another person’s tax return
- Not have claimed another used clean vehicle credit in the 3 years before the purchase date
In addition, your modified adjusted gross income (AGI) may not exceed:
- $150,000 for married filing jointly or a surviving spouse
- $112,500 for heads of households
- $75,000 for all other filers
You can use your modified AGI from the year you take delivery of the vehicle or the year before, whichever is less. If your income is below the threshold for 1 of the two years, you can claim the credit.
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Plus the vehicle eligibility section below which says
The sale qualifies only if:
- You buy the vehicle from a dealer
- For qualified used EVs, the dealer reports required information to you at the time of sale and to the IRS.
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Is it ever possible to buy the car out of lease from the original dealer?
I haven’t seen a clarification on this for leases, but right now the bank owns your lease, if you process a buyout from the dealer, you’re not buying a car from the dealer they are facilitating the buyout, not selling you the car. The only way I think you could accomplish this is if you ground your lease, or sold it to the dealership, and then the dealership took it into inventory and sold it back to you. obviously once you’ve either ground the lease or sold it to them, your car, you’ve lost control of whether or not, they sell it back to you at the residual value or whatever modest mark up they might charge.
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I suggest to do the lease buyout if you haven’t replaced your battery yet.
Ive been thinking about this as well my lease is up in october… there are alot of us coming off this boat. but we have to buy from a dealer, things dont look good for the 4k from irs. Too many stipulations
Wondering what difference it makes if I have replaced the battery. (haven’t)
A dealer is an entity “licensed to sell vehicles in your state.” Wouldn’t a leasing company qualify under that definition?
I’m not sure. But i would love that to be the case
Typically not, especially in GM’s case. Neither the OEM nor its subsidiaries sell cars in the US, their dealer network does.
Some of the upstarts that don’t use dealer networks might find a way finangle this, but nothing yet.
I did find another issue. The car can’t be sold to a “previous user” or someone in their household. Probably so husbands don’t sell their EVs to their wives and collect the rebate. That would seem to trump any question of whether GM Financial is “licensed to sell” when they sell you the car out of the lease. I wouldn’t know how to get around that.
Where does it say that
I am sure that I saw it, but when I tried my search again to answer you I couldn’t find it. I have been searching federal and California rebates.
Federal doesn’t say that, maybe you were looking at a local rebate like SCE