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by jonah 4270 days ago
What I wonder is why people are turning in their leases/selling their cars so soon?

What are the ratios of, gets a new car every couple years, more car than they could realistically afford, wasn't meeting their needs (range, passenger, luggage, person capacity), etc. etc.
3 comments
Moto7451 4270 days ago
I have some friends that only lease cars because they want a new one every two years. It doesn't matter if the car is perfectly OK and in great shape, they want a new car. They'll even lease the same car again.

I imagine car companies love them :).

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r00fus 4270 days ago
Is there some tax-favorability to leasing cars?

http://www.businessinsider.com/tax-loophole-on-luxury-cars-2...

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brk 4270 days ago
Not usually. In fact where I live (NH) the taxes work against it. Your annual fees are based on cars value. I was previosly doing a new lease vehicle every year (two vehicles on 2-year lease terms with staggered renewal years).

Now we buy and hold vehicles for 5-10 years.

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IkmoIkmo 4270 days ago
It's pretty surprising to me, too. It's not much like a smartphone which quadruples in performance and efficiency at higher resolutions, with a better camera while being thinner and lighter every two years. And I'd imagine that cars stay quite fashionable for at least a decade before a layman could recognize the car as being from a wholly different generation of cars cosmetically.

I mean if range (battery life) and repair requirements suddenly spiked down and up respectively, sure.

But from what I've heard, range stays pretty good, financially you're better off just replacing the battery than buying a new car every 2 years (ditching a $70k car at 50% value means you're paying about $1400 a month for your car on just depreciation costs!) and cars are much more reliable over time these days (with obvious exceptions recently).

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alistairSH 4270 days ago
Lots of 2-3 year leases while consumers felt out the product?

The Model S was released in mid-2012. So, the timing is right to ramp up the certified program by mid-2015 to catch vehicles that were leased for 3 years.

In the DC region, there are TONS of 2-3 year old vehicles for sale as certified, many of them off-lease. 3 of my last 4 vehicles have been bought that way. With the 30-40% discount from new and the 100k mile warranties, it works out pretty well.

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