Congrats on the car. Regardless of my personal outlook towards leasing you still have yourself a beautiful machine. Still waiting to pull the trigger on one myself.

Nah not a douchebag.

Leases are not a bad deal for pricier cars that you may not be able to afford. I can guarantee you that a good majority of the luxury or 'exotic' cars you see on the road weren't purchased. If you can get a good leasing deal with a good buyout price at the end of the lease, then it's not a terrible thing...just need to understand the math.

For me, aside from the changes I mentioned in the next few years...I'm not ok with putting money into something that continually depreciates with time and never builds equity. Sure, you can add on to it with mods and such to give it some added value, but in the end you'll never recoup the full cost you put into the car. And then as it ages, an older car will kill your savings account.

With leasing, while essentially a rental, I'm spending about half the cost of the car to drive it for half the time before it's really down in value (6 years).

But don't you only have it for 39 months? (480*39)+6000+500=25220 + whatever other fees such as tax etc etc. For simplicity's sake lets say $25220 otd.

in just over 3 yrs you've spent over half the price of the car (assuming 43k OTD: this is based on the invoice price for sport touring + nav and INCLUDES california TTL)

If you take the same car purchased and resold it after 39 months. Just speculating from what people have been asking for on 2009 touring nav models and from what I can find on autotrader really quick people are TRYING to sell at an average of $32,000. Lowest I could find was $23,000. Now call me crazy but that means, for these owners anyway they've lost between 11,000-20,000 respectively (keep in mind the '09 models cost less than the current models). The math just doesn't add up to me.

Now you might argue that 20k vs. 25k over a three year period isn't a big difference but what you can DO with the car makes a difference. Because you own the car you have the freedom to drive it as much as you bloody well want and modify it in any way you see fit.

Now I'll admit I've taken a lot of liberties with the math here, if you see some kink somewhere in the reasoning let me know. Also I'm not here to belittle anyone's decision, this conversation is meant for my knowledge only. I know you just got the car and the LAST thing I want to do is ruin that wonderful experience.

I have purchased and leased before. You are right more people lease expensive cars than cheaper car, yet the math never works in the favor of leasing (unless you can claim business expenses). If you look at the math of leasing, you will see you are always paying more in interest. A typical car loan is 0-3% right now, while leases are between 2-5% even for the great ones.

There is no value added by adding stuff to car, you only make it worse. You find value by buying the least amount of options with the right incentives. Anyway whatever makes you happy and glad you got what you are looking for. I was close with my numbers at least.