So once the sale of the 'old' car was in the bag (or handshake as the case may be) it was time to go out and get the new rig. As you might imagine, if you have been reading this blog for any extended period, there was quite a bit of research time and talking with dealers throughout Oregon and Washington. After talking it over with the most local-ish dealer, it quickly became obvious that volume sales of the Leaf were not exactly their 'thing.' It's not that they weren't interested, just not interested enough to actually have much stock and the stock they have is heavily weighed toward the higher profit margin units. They did have a really nice guy at the Drive Electric event. Bonus points!
Once we went through a bait and switch session with one dealer who will remain nameless the final competitors were Bellevue Nissan in the Seattle area and Dick Hannah in Gladstone (Portland OR). I would highly recommend either dealer to any potential buyer. Kyle at Bellevue was nice, informative and very responsive to questions. That dealership MUST be one of the top ones in the country for Leaf sales and it was impressive watching the stock on hand fluctuate over the last couple months. At one point I think they had almost 140 Leafs in stock. Highly recommended.
Jason Channer (the Sales Mgr) and Solomon Lopez at Dick Hannah were also great to work with and after recovering from one miscommunication early in the process things went smoothly. Highly recommended.
[Edit, a week later]: There was an error in the lease contract we signed. Maybe we should have caught this (in the dozen documents we signed) and maybe the finance guy at the dealer should have caught it, but regardless, Jason went the extra mile (or 200 miles...) and sent someone down from Portland to Eugene with a copy of the correct paperwork for us to sign. I've never heard of customer service like that. Kudos! Did we mention these folks are Highly Recommended?
[Edit 2 almost a month later]: Somehow the revised paperwork got snarled up between the dealer and NMAC (the Lease agency) and as a result we never saw the first monthly billing. Not wishing to be 'behind' right from the start we contacted the dealer, they found the problem and then stated that they would make our first months lease payment for us. Cool!! I don't know what happened, but they found the problem, they owned the problem, and totally went out of their way to make it right. Still highly recommended.
Anyways...
The two dealerships, selling the same product and using the same (NMAC) Leasing system, ended up within a couple dollars of each other on pricing. What's interesting is how far off from that the 'other' dealers we talked to were. Generally at least $1000 or more ($2000!) higher when totaled out over the course of the lease.
Both Dealers had stock of what we wanted: 2018 Leaf 40KWh model S + Fast Charging Package in Deep Blue. ~$5000 down and ~$200/month for 36 months. The final 'who got the business' ended up having much more to do with chance and nothing to do with who had the best deal or was the nicest.
Folks have had the usual "Why are you leasing again?" questions, and it comes down to the same reasoning as last time. See the earlier post on that. Leasing isn't the cheapest option, but it does have several advantages: Someone else takes the hit if the battery degrades more rapidly than expected. You don't have to qualify for the full Federal Tax Credit to get a good deal and you still have the option of buying it at any point in the process. Yes it does cost an additional ~$500 'Lease Origination Fee' at the beginning, but I think it's worth it. The effective interest rate is not 3% but rather 0.03% so from a time-value-of-money perspective it's not bad either. Do the math: $5000 + (36 x $200) + $9800 residual is around $22K. There are worse deals...
Now add in the $2500 Oregon EV Rebate (assuming that ever happens) and some other considerations we're now going into here and both cars taken together look (financially) like a $Zero down $200/mo four year 60,000 mile lease with a $9.8K residual. Will it be worth the $9.8K at the end? Ask me in three years...
One good reason to lease is highlighted by http://daveinolywa.blogspot.com/ and his Recent 6 month review of the 2018 Leaf. If the battery stats continue to degrade at his current rate he'll lose about a third of his battery capacity in the first 100,000 miles. If it's still looking bad near the end of the lease, I'll give it back. If OTOH the market value is high enough I'll buy it out and sell it ... which is what we did with the 2017: Totaling all up-front costs, registration, insurance, electricity and the buy-out price results in a number less than we sold it for. ie: 2017=Free Driving for almost two Years!
The other reason for getting the 2018 now is that Nissan should hit their 200,000 units cap for the federal tax credit in 2020 or 2021. If we waited to the end of the 2017 Leaf lease there might be no credits left.
Q: "But you're leasing, what do you care?"
A: The credit goes to the leasing firm and is the major portion of the ~$10K discount that Nissan applies before calculating the base price from which the lease dollar amounts are derived.
The difference should be about $120/month. Not small change...
Edit Oct.18: According to http://evadoption.com/ev-sales/federal-ev-tax-credit-phase-out-tracker-by-automaker/ the Leaf won't come off of the Federal$$Credit until 2020 or 2021 sometime. It appears our reasoning based on the credit phase-out in 2019 (at the bottom of the post) was incorrect. It's still possible all the credits will get killed in 2019 based on current maneuvering in the Senate.
We'll do another post later on the comparison between the two cars.
Edit 2021, there's also a post on the link above about an even later Leaf.
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