Volkswagen Looking To Lease The XL1
Published: May 27th, 2013
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Like the GM EV1, Volkswagen is planning a lease program from their XL1. While VW hasn’t announced pricing, the idea behind leasing is for VW to maintain a measure of control over the cars, specifically to ensure they’re located close to proper servicing centers and to avoid a secondary market for the cars. V W’s Mark Gillies confirmed to Autoblog that the lease program is the most likely avenue for customers to obtain an XL1.
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This might at first be seen as a car for wealthy yuppie/hippie, champagne-socialist types, but there's a lot more of the future in this car than we realize.
Even the Toyota Prius, in some markets, was sold as lease only to begin with so it's not completely strange that VW would choose to go the lease route. It protects both the manufacture and the customer, if you think about it.
Shades of the GM Impact, where they'll come and take the car you love away no matter how much money you offer them. I take it as a sign of bad faith that they won;t let you actually own it. That keeps Jay Leno from getting one too, as he's an owner not a lessee.
If GM was just upfront about the cars being just test marketed vehicles under lease then the whole EV-1 debacle would have never occured. People had the impression that these cars were to be mass produced one day and they'd eventually be for sale, but GM probably knew the whole time that it was just an test vehicle to judge consumer response, or a marketing gimmick. Most people don't realise alot of the work on the GM Impact was done by the company AeroVironment. Chrysler did the same thing with the turbine car, but they only let people borrow them, not lease them. I can see Jay Leno with one of these cars, if not personally owning one, at least doing a Jay Leno's Garage video story on it and test driving it.