Friday, February 3rd, 2012 at 4:36 pm
What are the Pros and Cons of Hybrid cars and should we lease them? In order to answer this question, we need to consider our Average Car Payment and take it a step further by including fuel costs into the figure. Before we do that though, a few more considerations should be made and here is where the question over buying vs leasing a car gets interesting. How long must we own and drive a hybrid automobile before our savings in gas pays for the extra investment we made for the Hybrid vehicle? The more miles we drive, the more quickly we are likely to benefit from the savings on gas. High Mileage drivers may be excluded from a car lease due to exceeding the 10,000 or 12,000 mile a year allowance on most lease contracts. To make matters even more complicated, most high mileage drivers have an unusually high percentage of freeway mileage over city mileage. The savings in gas on the freeway over a non-hybrid car are not nearly as impressive as the city mileage. Many of our smaller, economy family sedans like the Hyundai Elantra, Chevy Cruz, Honda Civic and Toyota Corolla are averaging near 40MPG on the highway. Even some of the middle sized sedans such as the Accord, Camry and Malibu are reaching low to mid 30mpg's on the highway. A Hybrid car like a Toyota Prius might get 50mpg on the highway, so the savings over an economy or mid-sized sedan is really only 20-25%. In the city is where real fuel savings can be made. Hybrids do as well or better with fuel economy in city than on the open freeways. If you're getting 48-50mpg on your Prius, you can be saving as much as 50% over a mid-sized family sedan. Also, city mileage drivers tend to stay within the mileage allowance limits of your typical lease contract. With these factors in mind, what are Hybrid Cars Pros and Cons?
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Monday, December 26th, 2011 at 4:31 pm
Exploring the Range Rover Lease vs Purchase
Why have Range Rover Lease deals been conspicuously absent from our monthly car lease ratings? Well, for lack of a better word, they haven't been very good. There is one possible explanation as to why a Range Rover does not lease well, but before we get to that, let's see what Land Rover has to offer in the way of leasing for the month of December
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Friday, December 23rd, 2011 at 9:24 pm

I can't believe it's already time to tabulate the best lease deals of 2011 for our annual Monthly Car Lease feature. What a change in the lease ratings for this year. The best lease deals of 2010 were only slightly similar with a few late-comers stealing some of the attention from Honda and Toyota. For 2010, Toyota had some breath-taking lease deals that blew us away. For example, the May 2010, Toyota Corolla LE leased for just $129.00 a month and $899.00 down. The .82 LVR is the lowest Lease Value Ratio ever recorded since the inception of Monthly Car Lease ratings over 2 years ago. It was just over a year ago that American cars started leasing again and it didn't take General Motors long to start winning some of the best lease deals of 2011 with the Chevrolet Traverse, Volt and Cadillac. We also saw Infiniti rise to the top with some great Lease Offers on the G37 and G25. Despite Toyota slippoing in the 2011 Lease Ratings, the Toyota RAV4 Lease remained strong. We saw some improved SUV Lease specials and some excellent, no-money-down lease specials from Honda. For the first time ever, one of those new-fangled cross-over vehicles topped the monthly lease offers: The Honda Cross Tour EX V6 in June.
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Wednesday, October 26th, 2011 at 2:07 pm

2012 Hyundai Genesis
Wouldn't it make sense to rate the lease deals on
2012 Model Cars before the 2011 year is over? Since late summer, many new, 2012 model cars have already been released with special leasing and financing incentives. While researching the monthly car lease ratings for the past couple of months, I've noticed that the lease offers on both 2011 and 2012 model cars are often listed side-by-side, with the 2012 usually being the more expensive deal of the two. In cases when where the 2012 model year offers nothing new, it really doesn't make a whole lot of sense to pay more for the newer model. For that reason, I thought it would be worthwhile to rate the lease offers on
2012 Model cars which offer either a similar or better payment than the 2011 models or offer something substantially new in design, functions and features.
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