stungela

I have a 2008 Audi A4 (B7) with ~ 41,000 miles and my extended lease is up at the end of June. I want to buyout my Audi and I wanted to ask the forum if anyone has had any luck negotiating the buyout price with Audi?

Thanks

A4Audi4Fun

Doubt it but I guess you can try. When you take out a lease, the residual is based on Audi's expectation of the value of the vehicle at lease end so they don't really have a reason to be selling back to you at anything less than what that residual value is.

Jer

No, you won't be able to negotiate a buy-out but not for the reason posted here. Residual is a guessing game kind of like the stock market. Sure there is a lot of science to it and for the most part it's somewhat predictable over time. They've been doing this for decades so they're pretty good at it nowadays. That being said since it's controlled by humans it can also be manipulated (much like the stock market) and numbers can be inflated or deflated in the interest of making more money up front or money on the back end or sometimes just to make a deal (read: inflated residual will make for lower monthly installments). The issue you will run into is many years ago manufacturers started purchasing insurance (think AIG) against the possible loss on the residual/value of vehicle leases. This means that if your residual is set at $20k and market value is $15k Toyota will get a check from the insurance for the difference, or $5k in this instance. They may have a 90% payout on the difference or something similar negotiated but there's no sense getting into the details since that's not important here. What's important is to know that there's no incentive for them to sell you the vehicle at anything less. Was a day when they would call you 6mos out from your last payment and offer you a discounted buy-out price and you could negotiate it if you were interested in buying it out but these days they send a contractor to make sure it's clean and verify miles and then you turn it in at a dealership until it gets picked up for auction. The key these days with a lease is to get the residual as high as possible to lower your monthly payment. Unless you have ultra low miles or something crazy happens with the market you shouldn't plan to buy a lease at the end because that means you paid more monthly than you should have.