smilingbee said:
Actually, the buyers would benefit more than the leasees from higher resale value in 3 yrs. At the end of 3 years the leasees will have the option to buy or return or the car. If they return the car, the leasees would have paid for depreciation that never happened. Alternatively, they could exercise their option to buy, but then the leasee loses what they paid for the "option" they gained via leasing.
Yes, I agree with this view and this was one of the reasons why I rejected the lease I originally negotiated. While I do believe that leasing makes a lot of sense for a car like the Leaf, I felt that Nissan's terms were simply too unattractive. If I factor in the money saved by not paying for the additional cost of the lease, the Leaf would have to fetch about $12.5 or $13K for me to be on par with a lease turn-in. That's still a lot of money, but to put it in relative terms, it's about what my coworker paid in fees and taxes for his M3. The M3 is a fine car, and I'm not trying to draw any comparisons, but my friend's gas mileage can be in single digits, and in purely economic terms, the Leaf makes sense, even when compared to present-day hybrids.
Could the resale value be zero in three years? Yes, it could, but this is an unlikely scenario. Could the resale value be above $20K? Maybe, but that's unlikely as well. As long as there is an $7.5K federal tax rebate and Nissan prices the Leaf at around $35K, it's really a $27K car. Cheaper if there are State rebates. Used Leafs will have to compete with new Leafs and potentially other vehicles, although Nissan is very competitive and it might take a while for other manufactures to catch on.
If you assume a 65% residual on a $27K car, then a three-year old Leaf could go for $17K. The closest thing to the Leaf are the 1st gen RAV4 EV and the Tesla Roadster. I believe that the residual for a three-year old Roadster is about 70%. The RAV4 EV had a much higher resale value, it was reportedly close to MSRP, but that's probably due to the fact that Toyota stopped making them.
It looks like Nissan has built a fairly comfortable cushion into the lease, and that's probably a fair thing to do. I don't think that this signals lack of confidence, if you lease, they have to carry all the risk - on top of their R&D costs. Barring a revolutionary shift in battery tech, the big uncertainty in my mind is the size of the EV market. I think that this is what Orient Express alluded to. Toyota made a bet with the Prius, and it worked out beautifully. I'm appreciative of what Nissan has done, and I hope that their bet will work out as well.