gatedad11 said:
Is it typical for a manufacturer or bank(such as Ally) to take a look at the market and see what they'd get for the car from wholesalers and consider reducing the residual to sell the cars outright to the leasees? If the price was low enough(and I don't mean insultingly low...that's silly too...) an original "owner" might/should feel comfortable buying the car if the price is right.
I think you're ignoring an important point here - as a financial institution interested in generating profits, Ally would have to have done that estimation of residual value
before writing the lease. Remember, they wrote a check to the dealer for the whole purchase price, so their end of the deal is the payments from you plus the tax credit (don't forget they get that) plus the sale of the vehicle at lease end. As it's obvious from a few numbers scratched on a napkin that your payments don't come anywhere near covering finance charges and any sane estimation of depreciation, we must figure that Ally has received either (a) an upfront payment from Mitsubishi in lieu of a rebate directly to the buyer (which is certainly the case with the 0% 48-mo. loan deal I took because it was the only free money on the table), or (b) a guaranteed re-purchase from Mitsubishi (or whomever) that backs up the residual value.
If it's (a), then sure, the residual price is just a joke, a price Ally's going to try to gouge you with if they can, but they'll gladly part with it for a lot less if that doesn't work out (though even then the odds are they'll just move it through their normal disposal channels - they're not really set up to negotiate with individual lessees, because that would undermine the whole business). The good news in that scenario is that the cars do wind up back on the market somehow or other, so somebody will get a decent deal out of it.
But if it's (b), the real decision will be made by the repurchase guarantor, because Ally has no incentive to settle for anything less than they've been promised. And what that party wants to do is anybody's guess; if it's Mitsubishi itself, I've already noted that I expect they'll have research uses for the cars that might outweigh their limited resale value. In that case, the cars disappear EV1 style (albeit more quietly, since customers who desperately want to keep their i-MiEV can easily do so by signing a check for a specific amount, so no weeping crowds milling around crushers).
It's that (b) scenario, plus vague concerns about how "excessive wear and tear" might be calculated (would it or would it not include battery degradation?) that turned me away from the lease deal. I want the car just as it is and I expect to drive it into the ground unless it becomes a collectible.
