Salesman Unlocks the Greatest Audi Lease Hack of All Time!
An Audi salesman figured out a hack that allowed his customers to lease a $150K+ Audi RS e-tron GT for only $300/month. (Less than an A3.)
You probably know the saying that if a deal sounds too good to be true then it usually is. Well, this is the rare case where a deal sounds too good to be true, but actually is true. The Audi RS e-tron GT is the flagship electric car in the Audi lineup. It makes up to 637 horsepower and can rocket you to 60 mph in about 3 seconds flat. However, all that performance doesn’t come cheap. A no-option RS e-tron GT starts at $148,595. And most have MSRPs well above that. Financing a $150K Audi RS e-tron GT for 5 years at 6 percent interest would cost you roughly $2,900 a month. That is well beyond the average monthly payment of $726 for a new car in 2024. But what if you could drive that Audi for about half of that average new car payment amount?
Does that sound too good to be true? Well, Ed Bolian recently posted a video on his VinWiki YouTube channel explaining how he was able to lease a brand-new Audi RS e-tron GT for about $250 a month “plus the fees and taxes and stuff like that.” Wait, what? Audi is advertising a national promotion right now for a lease deal on an A3 40 TFSI Quattro Premium with an MSRP of $40,595 for $439 per month. How in the world can you lease a car that is over $100K more expensive for even less money? Well, thanks to the fact that these cars are sitting on dealer lots like quite a few other electric cars now there are some big incentives being offered that make this incredible deal possible. Of course, there are some caveats.
The Deal
In the YouTube video, Bolian quotes the $250 a month payment but doesn’t really go too far into the specifics of the deal. So, we did our own research to uncover the true story. AudiWorld reached out to a sales manager at an Audi dealership (that is unrelated to this deal and wished to remain anonymous) to have him explain how this works. Here’s what we know.
Bolian’s lease is a 12-month, 7,500-mile lease deal, and you have to pay for the entire lease upfront in one payment. Currently, there are roughly $32,500 worth of rebates for an RS e-tron GT lease. Combine that with a discount of about 10 percent off the price of the car that a dealer is likely to offer you. Now, you are looking at nearly $50,000 off MSRP. The residual value of the car after one year is roughly 70 percent of MSRP.
Keep in mind that each state is different as far as how they calculate taxes on a lease. In some states, the sum of your lease payments is what you pay tax on. In other states, you pay sales tax on the lease payment itself. Another scenario is you pay sales tax on the full amount including rebates but less any actual discount. So, depending on your state your actual deal will vary. However, by paying everything up front, we figured Bolian paid roughly $4,000 to drive a new RS e-tron GT for an entire year. All in that is $333 per month. For a $150K car. Insane.
This genius deal was unlocked by Nick Underwood of Audi of Birmingham, who used the lease as an opportunity to turn his dealership into the number one Audi RS dealership in the U.S. (for this month, at least). His goal, he stated in a follow-up VinWiki video that was first published today and has since been taken down, was to score future RS allocations. The Ed Bolian version of the story, published last week, was so successful that it allegedly crashed Underwood’s cell phone and Audi of Birmingham’s phone system.
Good News and Bad News
The good news is fairly obvious. You are driving a flagship Audi with incredible performance for less than the price you would expect to pay for a base Audi compact sedan. The bad news is that it only lasts for a year. And it is extremely unlikely that you will find another deal like this again once the current stock of RS e-tron GTs run out.
But think of it this way… If you find one of these deals, you’ll end up driving around for a year in the most expensive model Audi sells. You’ll get used to the style technology and performance. And then you’ll have to go back to driving something more along the lines of the Audi A3 and paying even more money for the privilege.
Still, this might just be the greatest lease of all time.
Images: Audi
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