From a purely finance perspective, leases are the most risky lending form... and leases contributed a ton to the disasters that needed to be propped up with TARP money during the previous financial crisis.
From my own pragmatic perspective (feel free to tell the leasehackr folks how some dumb-azz on the Tesla forum doesn't know how leases work), I think Tesla screws with the retail/list pricing too much. While the money factor is typically where leases get fancy monkey-treatment to price things, everything that is part of a lease helps the lender make gains. As you noted, the way they capitalize certain costs and take advantage of various credits/fees goes into the lease to make it a complicated instrument. So leases are much more nuanced than a normal auto loan. However, the one part of a lease that is hard to maneuver is the residual.
With the other automakers, they will put factory-to-dealer or factory-to-buyer incentives on the table, but the erosion of residual value happens over many months/years. So, the lease book over at MB, BMW, or Audi is more stable. But things are still prone to disaster if the actual residuals on lease returns are significantly disconnected from the original leases issued 3 or 4 years prior. A ton of people are always pricing lease vintages and making sure they can move stuff around to balance their book though, so it's not as big of a problem today as it was in 2008.
Since Tesla has a recent tendency to just whack pricing on their website, doing so immediately screws the residuals on existing leases. Now everybody knows what a new Model 3 is worth, and this is immediately passed through to the fair value of lease vintages. Look at the 2022 pricing; any lease Tesla (or any other lender on Tesla vehicle leases) originated in 2022 is likely underwater now. Imagine if a normal vehicle would have had a 60% residual over 3 years; but Tesla slashes pricing 10%. Now that lease is probably looking at a 50% or worse 3-year resid.
Put differently... if the time a borrower is ready to return the lease on a 2022 delivery ... the buy-out price could be 20% over what the fair value of that vehicle is when the lease ends in 2025. The buyer would scoff and say how stupid it'd be to take possession of that vehicle after the lease since it's not worth as much as what the lender is asking them to pay. And logically, the lease return will go back into auction and whoever was bag-holding the collateral gets whacked. Tesla is probably protecting themselves the other way now; trying to capture as much value today and over the life of the lease payments. This ensures if the 2026 resid gets whacked, they don't lose money on the lease.
PS Edit: The way Mercedes is behaving (at least out here in California), they are aggressively pushing buyers into leases. There were a metric crap ton of lease incentives, programs, and lease subventions on EQB, EQE, and EQS when well qualified folks financed through MBFS (their captive financing arm). They were literally discouraging people from financing normal loans through MBFS and the F&I guy said he wouldn't even bother quoting our normal ICE purchase through MBFS since it was a waste of everyone's time lol. Being said, I think MBFS is trying to get some attractive high-FICO, high-FCF, high-earners into their lending portfolio. This will help get their ABS deals receive good pricing, and puts MBFS in a strong position to move their paper going forward. So, it's likely there is no chance that Tesla would come close to matching terms right now since MBFS is playing catch up while Tesla is king of the hill and DGAF.
IMO, go get a Mercedes EQS heh.
