I’m a buy it, own it, drive the wheels off it, sell it with 100,000+ on the odometer kinda guy. I’ve never leased a vehicle, and my experience with leasing is limited to precisely one Toyota Corolla, circa 1996, which was my then-girlfriend’s, now-wife’s car. She was moving up from a Mercury Tracer wagon (the Mazda-in-disguise one, a great little car) and really wanted a Toyota. A brand-new Toyota was practically a prestige car, even if it was just a Corolla, and she wanted it in the champagne color like below.
Did she also get the optional, dealer-applied gold plating for the badges? You know she did.
Anyway, the Corolla was, predictably, a perfectly terrific car. The only drag was the lease of it all, as the available mileage was depleting faster than the time remaining in the lease. Oops. And so, a lot of trips were made in my significantly rattier 1992 Corolla (blue with a blue interior, thanks for asking).
And so, we’ve never leased since. I could absolutely lease a car now, since I work from home and even a low-mileage lease would probably be plenty for me, but still, I prefer to own. At least, I would prefer to own a car I can safely assume will be reliable and long-lived, and at least cheap to fix if it falls below expectations in that regard.
But if I lusted for, say, the latest hotted-up BMW? Any Mercedes? Heaven help me, an Alfa Romeo? Yeah, that’s gonna be a lease. But I’m not Thomas, with his voluminous knowledge of these things. Maybe some of those are rock solid.
Also on the lease-list: anything I think I might get sick of. C8 Corvette, I’m looking at you. Or would I get enough of my money back if I bought and sold? It would just be a Stingray, mind you. I’d have to do some research.
What cars would you lease, but not buy?
Top graphic image: BMW
Without a doubt in my mind, they would be Range Rover, Audi, expensive Jeeps
Anything GM or Stellantis. Just make sure that the warranty period covers the entire lease before you sign.
If the dirt cheap ev leases happen again maybe. If for some reason I had to make a bad decision on something European they are lease machines for a reason. I guess really anything with huge depreciation you know you aren’t going to keep. Any kind of luxury or super car.
I am currently leasing an Ioniq 5. It’s my / our first leased car. My wife uses it for commuting and the 10k/yr is pretty dead on our mileage. If we go over, it’s not that huge a penalty.
What would I lease now?
Any car that has a good lease deal. When we got the Ioniq it would have been over $400/month for a manual Civic with $10k down. We are old enough that we bought a new Civic for not much more than that down payment and just couldn’t swallow that.
I live where it is too inconvenient to go to the dealership for warranty service. Even if the defect is covered, it’s still a pain in my ass to deal with it. So my next lease / purchase will be something reliable and probably boring because its main job will be 50 mile per day on I95. The lease / warranty factor doesn’t make much of a difference to me because I HATE going to dealer service departments. I want something that doesn’t require constant repairs.
If I want a high-maintenance German car, I will buy it used and depreciated as a 4th vehicle because I need the 3rd vehicle to be reliable-ish in case vehicle 1 or 2 need repair.
“What Cars Would You Lease But Not Buy?”
Pretty much any foreign car**. The only stealerships near me are a couple of GM ones, a couple of F*rd ones, and a RAM/Dodge/Jeep one. I’m not counting the Toyota one as both their sales and service departments have an abysmal reputation.
And I would only lease from a stealership that would put in writing that they would provide a loaner car and pick up / drop off service for any required service since all foreign stealerships are at least 100 miles away from where I live.
I would lease instead of buying so that once the lease was up I could give it back and not worry about any service issues anymore.
** Toyota/Lexus, Honda/Acura, Nissan/Infiniti, Kia/Hyundai, Volkswagen, BMW, etc.
I would lease a third car/hatchback.
I know a lot of people saying Jeep but I off road so much that I would not want to damage a leased Jeep.
Any German lux . . . even my old mechanic, the biggest winner if I needed work done on my car told me in no uncertain terms to enjoy the hell out of my BMW/Benz/Audi on a lease and no matter how good a deal they throw at your to buy it at the end, don’t do it.
If I needed something that big, a lease deal on a Chrysler minivan would be better than the “wait, take the color and options we give you and pay over MSRP for the privilege” Toyota Sienna game.
I read Leasehackr out of curiosity and it is pretty crazy to see some of the deals. Like the $134k BMW i7 recently posted for like $500/month. Or the sub-$100/month Dodge Hornets and Charger EVs from last year. Would I lust over driving some of these cars normally? Probably not, but for the right (low) price I might.
It is always about looking at depreciation, and whether the lease might let you beat the depreciation curve after incentives or a juiced up residual. I can buy a Mercedes and trade it in at 3 years, 36k miles if I am afraid of owning one out of warranty. The lease hopefully just lets you do it cheaper.
I drive too much for any lease. And this state charges tax on the full price of the car, not just lease payments, so they make leasing less attractive. Plus if I got the $134k BMW i7 for $500, I still get to pay personal property tax on a $134k car which will lessen the shine of the “deal” quite a bit.
My state also charges the full value sales tax, plus full value excise tax.
I don’t usually let the tax tail wag the car dog, but I’d have to consider it at that MSRP.
I like the might-get-sick-of-it criterion. I’m resolutely a car guy, so SUVs and trucks don’t usually do it for me. But I’ve become kinda intrigued by the Bronco, esp with the full soft top and a manual.
If you drive under 10-12k miles a year, easy answer is any EV.
Before manufactures caught on, any high resale value Honda or Toyota. You can be way over your miles, sell and what you sold for would still be well above your residual, you pocket the extra.
Acura had some crazy deals around 2016 or so. My friend found out that you could get an MDX for $11K off of MSRP if you do something like a $6K downpayment, lease it for 2 or 3 years, and then buy it for the fixed residual value determined at the start of the lease.
As long as lease deals are available, but I don’t know if manufacturers have huge excess inventory of EVs anymore.
I have enjoyed my ev lease time, especially considering how low the payment has been. At a lease price that represents the actual depreciation over the time of the lease, I would not be looking at evs.
Anything electric. I like to keep my cars for a long time and am not usually a lease person.
But the rate of progress of electric cars is insane, and a 3-5 year old electric (usually the sweet spot for me on gas cars) means a heavily outdated car.
Leasing is generally not for me. I don’t care about driving a brand new car (or even a particularly nice example of a car I like), so I wouldn’t benefit much from a lease. I’d rather buy used.
I saw a low mileage two year lease for a Bentayga a few years ago that seemed interesting, though. It was advertised for around $2,000/month. I didn’t read the fine print so I have no idea what the actual cost was, but I might consider paying $48,000 to occasionally drive a Bentley for a few years. It is a stupid waste of money, but it is probably one of the least stupid ways to drive something that expensive.
The closest thing I have to a pre-nup is that the wife gets a new car, I get her hand-me-down as my DD and I get to have a toy car.
We just leased a car for the first time about two years ago, and we’re open to that on the next one as well. I don’t expect interest rates to be low enough to not be a problem (yay, malaise 2.0 will be all shitty pickup trucks) when we’re shopping next year, so we’ll probably end up with another lease on whatever manufacturers can’t sell.
Shit. I’m going to end up with a Dodge.
Every single German car other than a 911 or 718
Jeep.
Anything I can write down the lease as an expense.
Depends on the Jeep, the TJ/LJ, XJ, and ZJ are worth owning – but none are younger than 20 years old.
An EV.
I’d be curious if it would work where I lived in a place that has cold winters and is somewhat far from a major metropolitan area. Would it hold up after a few years? Would it be a headache to deal with as it is a niche vehicle in an area that niche vehicles don’t have a ton of support?
I don’t put on a ton of mileage, so I could probably try a few road trips to the next major metro (400-500km away, testing out planning for charging) just to see how far I could comfortably get.
Then there’s the other obvious ones:
I would definitely lease an EV as an experiment, to try out that EV life, if I had the means to do so. But alas, the cheapest car is the one you own outright.
I leased an ev and it has worked out well. I’m in New England so we get cold winters (I know it’s colder in some places) and we see range drop about 30-35% in the cold months. So our ~300 mile range goes to ~200 miles in the cold months – still plenty for our needs.
I wouldn’t lease a sport car. These days my Miata sees well under an oil change worth of mileage in a year. That monthly payment would burn my soul 9 month of the year. I would lease a GR86/BRZ, but that’s a car my wife can commute in in fair weather and I could dd in winter / snow. We had an FR-S and it was fine for me in the winter with snow tires (I’ve always had rwd cars) as long as I turned off the traction / stability control.
Chinese EV – which is exactly what we did. A good way to test the waters on a brand without much cachet yet. Plus we get a good tax break here for leasing EVs so it made sense in that way too.
Jeep oh looord JEEP.
My wife has had wranglers since i met her. A 2018, then a 2021 gladiator(okay, not a wrangler), and now a 2024 4xe. The 2018, shockingly reliable. The gladiator? O2 sensors at 1500 miles. valve cover gaskets at 5. steering at 12. blown speakers at 17.bad third brakelight. the 4xe? Its a 4xe. She will lease, and NOT buy. Even her rule. But why does she keep getting one? She likes a 4×4 convertible. Her next one is this spring, so we shall see what happens. Shes open to a bronco, 2 door only.
Why am I okay with the unreliable leases? first, its a car I dont need to maintain. Second, her rule is ‘I dont care what you get, as long as I get what I want.’. And yes, that applies to quality AND quality.
I don’t understand the thinking that it’s better to lease if the car is unreliable. That just means you’re paying rent on it while it sits in the shop. Better to just buy or even lease something reliable. Not that you can always tell ahead of time.
Sounds like you have a similar situation to my own, but I am still somehow drawn into my wife’s care issues.
For example, my wife called me while I was on my way to work a few weeks ago. She had a flat. The same flat the car had warned her about on her way home the day before that she failed to mention.
I had to turn back to home. Then took the tire off and went to plug it but my rubber cement was all dried up. So I had to run to the parts store, repair the tire and then go into work an hour late. She was able to work from home.
I guess I should be happy that she hasn’t run over a drywall nail in a while so the rubber cement was dried up, but it still seemed like an inconvenience when I was in the steamy garage counting my minutes late and falling behind while she sat comfortable in AC keeping her head above water.
Any new car from Audi, BMW, or Mercedes would only find it’s way into my driveway with a lease; and honestly, I’d rather buy an older car outright than even lease a high end German luxury car. They are simply too complicated to be reliable, too expensive to fix, and in a race down a cliff would only be beaten by their own plummeting value. The depreciation alone rules out a new purchase, and the cost and complexity of ownership rules out anything used.
Give me a W123 or a Sacco-era Mercedes over anything made in the last 20 years.
Any EV. They are not worth the depreciation.