I wouldn't be so sure about this. BMW makes the active decision to not let the customer buy the car at market price for the benefit of its dealers.
Just play this out...BMW subsidizes your lease with an unrealistically high residual. When you return the car to them they still have to unload the car at wholesale price to a dealer who will then mark up the price up from wholesale to market levels. So, BMW FS is willing to take the hit from unrealistically high residual down to wholesale, instead of letting us just buying the car outright at market price. BMW FS loses either way. The dealer gets a shot at selling decent off lease car, while the customer (who could have just kept the car at a fair price), has no realisitic chance of keeping the car. Sure, the customer got a great lease deal, but BMW FS set that stage and could just as easily set the second "off lease" stage to benefit the customer as well...but they don't.
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Originally Posted by simianspeedster
Basically, it's a case where you can't reasonably expect to get the best of both worlds.
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So if you lease a car and turn it in with no issues, you can get a great deal end to end. But the flip side is that the high residual makes a buyout feel like a ripoff. That said, it's not fair to expect BMW to eat it on both sides of the coin.
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