What Happens When The “Stupid Lease” Ends?

All good things come to and end with our Q7. The 3 years lease is up, what should we do with our wonderful Q7? Let’s sum it up with our experience with the Q7, the garage Queen.

In 3 years, we drove almost 21k miles, it’s mostly the weekend car thanks to our reliable drivers: 96 A6 Wagon and 98 A8. The 21k miles are driven to long trips like Vegas, Reno, and Southern California. The weather’s been great in CA and we had no problem with our Q7 what so ever. Yes, the keyless remotes are a little short range compare to the A6’s & A8’s but they work.

We had the car serviced about 3-4 times total which we paid $600 for 4 years/60k miles service contract when we leased our car.

The tires are still good, the brakes are still stopping on time, the acceleration and power to climb 8000 feet altitude have not diminished.

All electronics still work without any intermittent problems. The massive panoramic sunroof is still tight and not leaking.

Nothing is falling off or out of place. The car is still like new. The more we drive the car, the better it feels and the more we love it.

Options at the end of lease.

CPO it or not?

With this option, we have to take it to any dealer to get it certified with 301 points inspection and we have to pay for the inspection $350+ depends on the dealers. If the car pass the rigorous inspection without fixing requirements, we’re eligible for low financing 2.9%-3.9% for 60 months with AFS and 6years/100k miles extended warranty for $1500-$1800 depends upon the dealers again. We will have to sell the car to the dealer for the residual or whatever we owed on the lease and some dealers will add $1000 or not profit and sell it back to us if it passed CPO. Some dealers would offer no CPO if we don’t want to have it for just a little higher interest rate. So, average would cost us $2000 minimum to get CPO and 6years/100k miles warranty + fixing the requirements like brakes pads or tires are less than minimum requirements. 

CPO 6years/100k miles catch

The warranty is NOT transferable to the new owner, only on the original owner, so if we plan to have CPO to sell it as a great used car with warranty, it’s out. The original manufacturer warranty is 4years/50k miles, so actually the CPO warranty only cover the last 2 years + 50k miles. Like our Garage Queen Q7, we will have 40k miles after 6 years, it doesn’t make sense to get the CPO and have to deal with all these inspections and pay the money up front.

AFS Re-financing

AFS will not discount the residual as our 98 A6 lease before ($17k down to $15k) because the residual of our Q7 is much lower than the market value. The interest rate is higher @ 4.64% for 60-72 months which is still good for used car. As a 20 years loyal customer, my bank can only offered me 9.8% on my Q7.

So we got our loan through AFS and never look back.

Total cost after all said and done.

$4600 (down payment) + $18632($548×34) + $36540 ($609×60) = $59772 total principle, tax and interests after 9 years.

Is it bad for a great real 7 passenger SUV from Audi?

08 Q7

Cheers,

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.