I'm leasing a 450h and have a question for people who have experience returning cars to Lexus Financial. Specifically, I need to know how picky they are with regard to assessing excessive wear and tear charges.

I just closed the garage door and it made a scratch on the rear bumper. The scratch is not deep, i.e. the plastic is not gouged, but the silver paint is neatly scraped off all the way through to the black plastic. The scratch is perfectly vertical, about 1/8 of an inch in width and 2-3 inches in length.

My choices are:

1. Some time before lease termination (almost three years from now) have the bumper repainted. This seems like and extreme overkill for something this minor. It would probably cost somewhere in $1,000 range.

2. Buy touch-up paint and touch it up myself. Or maybe have Lexus dealership touch it up, if they do that kind of a thing. My experience with touch-up paint tells me that the scratch would still be quite visible, albeit not black anymore.

3. Do nothing at all. If this was a purchased car, this would definitely be my option. We seem to do some kind of damage to every car we buy within the first couple months of ownership. And we never bothered fixing minor bumper damage before.

So my question to people with experience returning cars to Lexus Financial: do you think they will assess excessive wear & tear charges if I go with option 2 or 3?

Thank you.

 

lfs is the least picky of all the leasing companies with regards to condition on turn-in. i would wait until your lease is about up and use a $10 tube of touch up paint on stuff like that - no doubt more will happen before your lease is up. enjoy your new lexus!

 

I would consider checking with your Lexus dealer about letting them professionally touch up the spot. My dealer knicked the front area on my IS350 when they repaired the oil leak. I requested they touch up the knick rather than repainting the whole front bumper area. They did a great job and I have to admit I am very picky. Something to think about.

 

I would agree ... wait until you get closer to the end of your lease before you start worrying too much about it. There will be other minor things you will need to "touch up" before you turn it in. I recently turned in my 2003 GS 300 and they didn't ask me a single thing about it; they barely looked at the car when I turned it in. I don't know if that was because I went straight into another lease or what but I had no issues when I turned in my leased car.

 

Hijacking this thread a bit, I hope no one minds.

My leased (thru LFS) 3GS came with the Dunlop runflat tires and the temporary spare tire. I was planning on replacing the Dunlops with something else when they get too worn ... definitely non-runflat tires ... and probably before next winter. I have about 15K miles now, with 2 more years to go on the lease. Will probably be right around 45K at lease end.

I know that at lease return you need to have a matched set of tires with some minimum amount of tread depth (don't remember the exact number), but I'm wondering if since the car came with runflats it has to be returned with runflats.

I was thinking that if that is the case, then I should change the tires now and save the runflats to put back on the car before lease return. (This also gives me an "excuse" to change the tires now to something better!)

I'd appreciate hearing experiences and thoughts on this. Thanks in advance.

 

I asked this question of the lease return representative at the local Lexus dealership. The answer was "no" - you don't need to have run-flats on the car when you return it. I asked it because I hated my run-flats, and replaced them after one week of car ownership.

Also, if I remember correctly, you are supposed to have at least 40% of the tread left at return.

 

Thanks, Modeler. Exactly what I needed to know.