The offer to lease a Ford Taurus for about $250 a month two years ago was hard to refuse.
Now tens of thousands of Tauruses, many of them leased by Ford employees and their families, will be returned over the next few months and their drivers are responsible for how well they were cared for.Returning cars is the latest stage of a phenomenon that prompted many people to try leasing for the first time. Even though guidelines on acceptable and excess damage are included in their contract, most drivers have no firsthand experience with returning a leased car and might be in for a surprise.
"Up until now, I would say the wear and tear expectations of a customer have been somewhat unknown," said Roger Olsen, Ford's manager of retail leasing. "You might have a dealer say, `Think of it just like it was your own car."'
That works fine if you're neat - and lucky. Not so if you drive around with a busted taillight, cracked windshield or have been in a fender bender and haven't gotten it fixed.
In an effort to define normal wear and tear, Ford has created standards covering how much damage is appropriate after a two-year lease.
"We didn't think it was enough to say `Trust us,' " Olsen said.
Dealers who inspect the returning cars have a video of what to look for. An accompanying manual with pictures is for dealership service department workers who usually hammer out small dents and dings and do other reconditioning to get the car ready to be sold or leased again.
If it takes more than 31/2 hours to fix any panel on the car, then you could be charged for it. The average service department labor rate is about $45 per hour, so a 31/2-hour repair might cost $150.
"Part of it is educating our dealers because before they didn't know quite what the standard was," said Jerry Feldman, who specializes in finding homes for cars coming off leases. The standard is "an art, not a science, but it's a lot better than what's used today."
Basically, the standard comes down to common sense. For example, more wear on the driver's seat than the passenger's seat is acceptable. So are small scratches and minor dents. A broken-off radio antenna, torn upholstery and poor-quality repairs are not.
A Ford brochure given to every lease customer gives general explanations of acceptable and excess wear and tear. It also advises checking with your insurance company to see whether anything considered excess damage might be covered.
"The idea is to not wait until the last day," Olsen said.
Even with the manual, dealers can cut some slack to a customer, especially if it means keeping that person driving a Ford.
Ford has a balancing act in judging how bad the car looks, and whether to charge the customer for it. Dispute resolutions must be "friendly enough to foster renewals," Olsen said.
"We really haven't had a problem with that in our dealership and we do 33 percent leases," said Ed Maroon, general sales manager at Dahl Ford in Davenport, Iowa. "We did 50 renewals last year and there was not a dispute in any of them. And that was before there was a manual."
Maroon said his dealership doesn't have the manual yet but he would happily let a customer look at it, especially if it would convince them they were being treated fairly.
The dealer's goal is to put you in another lease before yours is up - especially with so many cars due back at one time. About 33,000 Taurus and 17,000 Mercury Sable two-year leases expire between now and December.
They seem to be achieving it. Sixty-three percent of people who leased a Taurus in 1992 are leasing another Ford car or truck. Dealers are keeping most of the returned cars to sell on their used-car lots. Those returned by the customer and passed by the dealer go to auctions exclusively for Ford dealers.
A few are being leased as a used car to the same person who leased it new. Ford discourages the practice but doesn't forbid it. The automaker created some confusion back in February when it announced it would begin leasing used cars. The program was intended for people in the used car market, not people who have leased a new Taurus.
Yes, the typical monthly payment would drop about $40 from $250 to $210, but at the end of four years, you still wouldn't own the car and the decision of what to do would have to be made all over again.