DrGP

Retail price is what a customer will pay the dealer to buy the car.

With one month left you have these options.

BEST OPTION
1) Trade the car in to a VW/Audi dealer and buy or lease another car from them- Advantage: You won't have to pay $960 for excessive wear and tear,.and your car probably has equity which you can either take as a cash payment from the new dealer and put it in your pocket or put toward the next car you buy or lease from that dealer

2) Buy the car from the lease company and resell it privately. Advantage,:You don't have to pay $960 and most likely will make a profit on the sale.. Disadvantage, you will need to finance the new car and perhaps(depending on what state you live in) may need to pay sale tax twice on the 2 transactions and go through the hassle of selling your car privately. I have done this with my '04 S4 and came away with $ 3k on the deal. AFS/VW credit will finance your car if you need to and for the longest term available. No need to use the dealer. At that point you could sell it to Carmax if you have no buyers .

Worst Option.
3) Turn in car to leasing company. Pay $960 for excessive wear and tear and possibly a $250- $500 lease turn in fee. Advantage , you get rid of your car. Disadvantage , you are out quite a bit of money and have lost any equity your car has. Not smart financially

FYI, you have the option of fixing the excessive wear and tear issues yourself, which could save you some money.

limsilas

I see. Any idea if that would be higher or lower than my buyout price?

superswiss

That depends. You can check the value for your car at kbb.com and see what it would sell for at a dealer.

DrGP

A lot higher. A non Audi/VW dealer will never buy your car for retail price since there is no profit to be made on the car. Might even lose money.

Cobalt03

If you don't mind me asking, what is your buyout? You have very low miles on that car. By way of comparison--I just bought my 2015 off lease and had 15k miles on it at the end of my 36 month/10k year lease. I see dealer's listing cars like this (optioned as my car is) in the low 40s. So probably could be bought for high 30s. My buyout was 33k. Seemed like a no brainer to me to buy the car, keep the equity and continue enjoying it. Nothing else out there I really wanted to replace it with that wasn't a lot more $.

When I did my paperwork at the dealer, they also said I would have been crazy to turn the car back in with that buyout. If you can buy the car and resell it within 10 days w/o paying sales tax I would be exploring that option if you can't just keep the car. No reason to give that equity back (I am assuming you have some). And that certainly deals with the wear and tear issue--its off the table so you save $1k there already.