Returning a leased car: keeping the final bill small

Practically every post-return claim has one of three causes: more kilometres than agreed, damage beyond what counts as fair wear, or missing parts and paperwork. All three are governed by the contract, and all three can be influenced — the first only within limits, the other two largely.

What regularly surprises people is not the size of any one item but how many there are. A scratch, a cracked mirror housing, two kerbed wheels, a chip in the windscreen and tyres just above the legal minimum add up to a total in which no individual item looks unreasonable.

And it surprises people who produces the bill. Not the dealer you hand the car back to, but the leasing company — on the basis of a return report written by an assessor. The dealer is the messenger, not the decision-maker, and negotiating with him accordingly achieves little.

Get the contract out before you do anything else. Four entries decide everything that follows, and three of them most lessees do not know by heart.

Project the mileage as soon as you have the first figure: current reading, divided by the months elapsed, times the full term. If that produces an overrun, you still have months in which to drive less or leave the car standing — and that is the one adjustment nobody can make on handover day.

“Fair wear and tear” is not a feeling; in most contracts it follows an industry standard that describes quite precisely what is accepted. The logic behind it is remarkably consistent: what is accepted is what does not measurably reduce the car's value and needs no work before resale.

In practice: fine scratches in the paint that polish out are fine; scratches that catch a fingernail and reach the primer are not. Stone chips on the nose are fine; chips in the driver's field of view are not. Light use marks on the seats are fine; burn holes, tears and stains are not.

Two points are underestimated especially often. First, wheels: kerb marks on the rim flange normally count as damage rather than wear, and they usually appear on several wheels at once. Second, tyres: they must not only clear the legal minimum tread but often a higher contractual one, and they must match each other in brand and specification.

Many leasing companies offer a pre-return inspection, typically some weeks before the handover date. It is the single most effective step in this whole piece, because it gives you the list of objections while you still have time to deal with them yourself, at your own price.

The difference is not small. A set of tyres, a chip repair and a smart-repair polish at a workshop of your choosing cost a fraction of what the same items come to in a return settlement, where replacement rather than repair is assumed and franchised-workshop rates apply.

If no pre-inspection is offered, do it yourself: wash the car, park it in daylight on a light surface and walk round it with the return-conditions annexe in hand. What you notice, the assessor will notice too.

Not every defect is worth repairing. The rule of thumb: anything a specialist can repair rather than replace is worth doing; anything that even they can only fix by replacement usually is not — then you pay twice for the same item.

Have the work done somewhere that gives you an itemised invoice, and keep it. If an item later appears in the settlement that you can prove was put right, the invoice is your argument. Without it, it is your word against an assessment, and in that pairing the assessment usually wins.

A missing service entry is one of the few items that can no longer be cured on handover day. So check early that every prescribed service is documented, that it happened where the contract requires, and that recalls have been carried out. An outstanding recall is a value reduction for the leasing company and, for you, a trip to the workshop.

Before handover your own data belongs out of the car too: paired phones, address book, destination history, garage door opener, the vehicle account in the maker's app and the link to your user account. That is not a cost question, but it is the one thing nobody can reach after the car is gone.

Turn up with the car washed and vacuumed. This is not cosmetic: an assessor who cannot tell dirt from damage will write damage when in doubt. On a clean car scratches are visible, but only the ones that are genuinely there.

Ask to see the return report and read it before you sign. Write in where you disagree — “scratch on driver's door present at delivery” or “front right wheel in my view fair wear” — and then sign with that note. A signature under a blank or incomplete report is the most expensive one in the whole process.

And take your own photos, all round and of the odometer, on the same day and in the same place. A car that sits on a yard after return and gets shunted about can pick up damage there that you would otherwise be unable to separate from your own.

Check every item against the report and against your photos. The amounts claimed often assume replacement where a repair would have done; that is an objection you can raise if you can show what the damage looked like. Without your own pictures it is an assertion against an assessment.

And then there is the route that makes the whole bill unnecessary: take the car over yourself and sell it on. Many contracts state a residual value or allow a buyout, and if the market price exceeds that figure, selling on the open market is the better sum — all the more so if extra kilometres and damage would have been billed anyway.

That sum is quickly done: the contractual residual value plus the foreseeable settlement on one side, the price of comparable cars on the market on the other. If the second figure is higher, selling it yourself pays — and then the same rules apply to you as to any other private seller, from setting the price to the warranty exclusion in the contract.