I would recommend against leaving your current vehicle, but if you decide to, sell it yourself instead of trading it in. As you can see, you will take a beating on a trade because the dealer wants a ton of profit headroom. I recently sold my 17 911. The dealer offered me 69. I sold it for 83. It cost me a $5 dollar ad on car gurus and a few months of waiting. I made 14k for the effort.

There’s no problem selling a leased vehicle. You just have to satisfy the full balance.

 

Mines is a 23” a purchase (Financed ) was just thinking that it would possibly make sense to sell & get into a new lease. Avoiding any negative equity down the road… when purchased last year lease programs were terrible, not that they are great now. But,better! unless most of my deprecation stabilizes & holds. This is Not just for a lower payment… Unlike yourself, My Purchase/build price was higher when I bought. Thx for your input…

 

Thx for the reply & info.. much appreciated!
Great to hear that u held out & did well on Porsche… I am probably looking at this wrong with wanting to sell my purchased Defender after the fact & move into a lease now. It’s just honestly, I am accustomed to leasing. Last year leasing was out of the question with no programs!

 

My 2 cents:

1 - Your interest rate is a significant metric when comparing to others here. You are at 7.5% - normal for these days, but waaaay too high when compared to people that bought their cars 2 or 3 years ago.
2 - IMO values of used Defenders will take a significant hit after the GX starts selling (unless there is a huge flop with reliability issues on the GX - I personally doubt it being a Lexus/Toyota). I disagree with the opinion that the GX will not appeal to a Defender buyer. Quite the opposite. The GX aims squarely into the Defender. The design is NOT as beautiful as the Defender, but it is pretty damn close. I can see people willing to trade a striking design for the added reliability and avoid having their cars towed to the dealer every other week to fix issues (I may be exaggerating here, but if you look in this forum you will see many many similar stories.) People are not all stranded on the side of the road left and right, but the many issues plaguing Defenders are well documented here.
3 - If you are being offered less than your pay-off now, you probably bought a car more expensive than you can afford (assuming you maximized your down payment and did not hold back any money). I would try to maximize the trade appraisal or selling price to private as much as I could and bite the bullet. Your hole is only going to get bigger and deeper. These cars are not going up in value by any means and the added influx of used 4 year old Defenders out of warranty and being priced at mid to low $50s won't help you. Best case they will keep the current depreciation rate - Like I said, most probably, values will take a hard hit from the GX sales.

 

Wait, so the marketplace is blissfully unaware that Land Rovers might not be top of the JD Power reliability surveys and it will take the launch of a Toyota to snap everyone back to reality and cause prices to plummet because they've suddenly found out about that?

 

And forums, by their very nature, will always accentuate the negative and downplay the positive. People aren't motivated to share their positive experiences nearly as much as they are predisposed to share their negative ones. That's just as true of Lexus and Toyota forums as it is Land Rover forums.

 

Not necessarily. Just think like this. Defender is that gorgeous supermodel (A+) that you know is a little slutty and might give you issues in the future but you can' really resist and marry her thinking you will be able to change her or you will just accept her for what she is and get on with your life. All other girls are really more like B- or C+ and although they are all very correct and a safe bet for a calm and stable marriage, they don' really rock you. All of a sudden, there is this new girl in town not quite gorgeous as the supermodel, but still a solid A-. She really rocks you, is as stable and reliable as the C+ and is (almost) as gorgeous as the problematic A+. What I am saying is that you knew the A+ was trouble, but could not resist because you had no close alternative. The moment the A- came around, the attractiveness of the A+ will instantly be reduced. It is just the nature of having a balanced competition.

 

Lol … Great analogy! 😂😂😂

 

Thx for your input. Good info here ^^^ to answer your question, I did not maximize my down $ I put down a tad under 20% of the msrp…. Again thx for sharing.

 

I sold a 23 Toyota Tundra limited to switch to the defender. The tundras all have the 3.4 twin turbo engine. 22 and 23 models have a small percentage blowing their motors. The Tundra forums are full of quality and reliability issues experienced by their owners. Mine was solid, though i was without its use for 2.5 months because of waiting on a temporary recall and parts for that recall. I would have had to go back for a permanent fix sometime this summer.

Making the assumption that the GX or any other pandemic designed, chip shortaged vehicle will have the reliability of their pre-pandemic predecessor is a mistake. From what I see, many brands, including Toyota, dropped their exceptional quality to about average. I said this to my tundra owning buddy’s, if the best quality is now average, then I’ll drive a Land Rover over a Toyota, everyday.

We don’t really know if the GX, which uses the tundra 3.4 engine, will really be reliable. THere’s an assumption it will be just as many assumed the Defender would be as bad as older LRs in general. This forum has people with with issues but the Toyota tundra forums is a whole order of magnitude more.