Car Leasing Blog

Unless your home address is The International Space Station, you've probably deduced with your own mind that Mondeo leasing is a reasonably popular activity here on earth.

It has now also been confirmed as the car that clocks up the highest average annual mileage - 15,483 miles each year. That's over 700 more than the next model down on the monster mileage list, the Saab 9-5.

There's one that'll impress everyone down the pub tonight.

Can it be done? 524 people in a Jaguar? Yes, just ask South Wales Police.

'Operation Jaguar', to give it it's full title, was a massive two-day crack-down on crime in the South Wales area which resulted in 524 people being arrested for various offences.

Of course, you can't get 524 people in a lease Jaguar. That would just be a silly claim.

Kevin "only gay in the village" Shaw, the latest victim of Sir Alan's sausagey finger-pointing on BBC show 'The Apprentice', has been boasting about having sex in his Porsche.

I found it fairly hard to believe the idea that he has a Porsche, but the idea that someone would willingly have sex in it with him? Come on - animals and your own hand don't count, Kevin.

I bet your all gagging to lease a Porsche now? Or maybe just gagging.

Look at these wheels on the BMW M1 concept - if you get a passenger to do some precision leaning, holding a block of your favourite cheddar against the wheel in one hand and a nice baguette behind it in the other, you can make a delightful lunch as you crawl along the motorway.

If that's not reason enough to consider BMW leasing then I don't know what is.

Some scallies recently tried to pinch a Porsche from a house in Oxfordshire, but were scuppered by the car's flat battery!

They broke into the address in Westland Road, Faringdon, and stole the keys to the Porsche and a BMW 728i.

Sadly, they escaped with the BMW, but the flat battery is still a satisfying 'one in the eye' for the thieving toe-rags!

Perhaps they don't know about Porsche leasing - you don't have to be able to afford to BUY one any more, you idiots!

"What? Mercedes? Drug trade? I'm returning my Mercedes lease car right now!" I hear you say.

Don't worry - it's not THAT Mercedes. It's a far less squeaky clean type of Mercedes - Mercedes Corby, to be exact - sister of convicted Ozzie drug trafficker Schapelle Corby.

A far less surprising snippet of news as it turns out.

Phew.

If you lease a Porsche, I'm sure you'll feel all warm inside knowing that, in a small way, you have contributed to making Wendelin Wiedeking, CEO of Porsche, the industry's official top earner.

Last year, he earned €60 million - 6 times that of his Daimler counterpart (and that's
excluding bonuses of €70m!)

I'll probably get plenty of abuse for saying this, but am I alone in being slightly under-impressed by the new Jaguar XF in the flesh?

The web was littered with some fantastic looking images prior to it's roll-out, and Jaguar XF leasing is certainly in demand, but having seen a few on the road, it just doesn't excite me like I thought it would.

A maroon coloured XF passed me at a roundabout the other day, and I'm sad to report that it looked a bit like a bloated Toyota Avensis! (Although, maroon? It's no coincidence that the word is an anagram of 'a moron'!)

I'm hoping it's just the usual new model trick at play here; bring it out looking average and then start sticking the good bits on to push sales when the initial buzz gets diluted. Even so, I thought this was the reserve of models like the Vauxhall Corsa - it seems a bit of a cheap trick for the XF.

I got an email the other day saying:

"Dear my-carleasing.com,

I have recently received my Porsche 911 GT2 which I ordered from your car leasing site last month. This is my first experience of leasing a Porsche, so I was really shocked and unhappy to find that a £131,070 car couldn't hold all my shopping when I went to Tesco last night. I want a refund please."

Did I REALLY get this email? Did I b****cks! Anyone even remotely interested in the 911 GT2 knows it's got **** all to do with practicality; it's intended to be a raw power, face-stripping, buttock-clenching beast of a machine. And it doesn't disappoint.

Forget how many baguettes you balance on the boot lid - here are the only stats you'll want to know:

Engine: 3.6 litres
Bhp: 530
0-62mph: 3.7s
Max Speed: 204mph
Driving Pleasure: 100%!

Alex Brooks, a 19-year-old learner driver from Llanelli, South Wales, decided to take his dad's beamer for a spin whilst his parents were away on their hols.

Naturally, he made sure he got boozed-up first!!!?? I wonder where this tale is going...?

That's right - it's going straight off the A484 at high speed and smack into a chevron sign at a roundabout.

The teen fool narrowly escaped prison as a result of the incident, but he may have wished he'd been jailed as he is unlikely to have escaped his father's wrath - Brooks senior lost £4,000 in the affair, as his insurer only paid out £15,000 for the £19,000 BMW 325!

If you want to try and limit the damage, Alex, then maybe you could tactfully alert your dad to some tasty BMW lease options... standing a safe distance away, of course.

The battle between Ken Livingstone and Porsche over the proposed increase in the London congestion charge continues.

In the latest installment, Porsche have quoted figures from a leaked Transport for London report that was never made public. No wonder, since the report reveals that the higher charge of £25 would increase CO2 levels in Greater London by 182,000 tonnes, according to Porsche.

The emissions increase would be caused by the number of drivers choosing to add extra mileage to their journey rather than stump up the hefty charge.

This is great fuel for the argument (no pun intended), as Mayor Ken claims that the increased charge will reduce CO2. Lease Porsche customers continue to watch the debate unfold with interest...

Icon of modern pop nonsense and boozed-up barmy antics, Britney Spears, reportedly caused a three-car pile up on a busy LA street earlier this month while applying make-up at the wheel.

The driver in front was apparently admiring Spears' white Mercedes in the rear view mirror, before getting a much closer look when she ran into the back of his car!

You've got to love the Spears! It's not a great image for Mercedes leasing, but it's another great story for the pop trash collection.

Here's the Audi Q5, if you're already an Audi leasing fan who's thinking of jumping on the SUV bandwagon. But if this is Q5, what about the first four questions...

Q1. Do we really need another SUV in the world?

Q2. Does it look any different to the BMW X6?

Q3. Will anyone who drives one ever go any further off-road than the pavement outside Waitrose?

Q4. Have you ever met a driver of an SUV who can give you a valid reason for owning one?

Wahey! Just when you thought life wasn't worth living, now SAAB are thrusting another pointless SUV into our grimacing faces.

Spy shots have appeared on the Auto Express web site, and guess what? It looks like every other boring kiddie chariot we've been subjected to in recent years.

People will go for it though, no doubt. God only knows why, but they've fallen for all the other identically characterless crap. I think they're really letting the side down for SAAB lease customers.

A study into the habits of 2,500 Australian drivers concluded that people who lease BMW models are more likely to drink alcohol and drive than drivers of any other lease cars.

It also concluded that Ford drivers are the most likely to drive after taking illegal drugs.

There's a few unwritten privileges that come with getting old - pretending you don't hear stuff you don't want to... inventing glorious events from your past that never happened... but destroying Porsches is a new one on me!

There are two less Porsche lease cars available in the world after 93 year old William "Jack" Higgs had a bad day behind the wheel of his £600 Ford Fiesta. Having never had a single incident in 76 years of motoring, he made up for it in one fell swoop when he managed flip his Fiesta (whilst reversing!) onto a Carrera II and a 911 outside a Porsche showroom in Penarth, near Cardiff.

He is quoted as saying: "I just don't know what happened except that I lost control as I was reversing." Hmm, or was he indulging in a spot of that elderly mischief we're surely all entitled to if we make it to our nineties? We'll never know...

BMW lease customers may be concerned to hear that they are openly giving money to Mad Men!!

Don't worry, though - 'Mad Men' is the title of another US drama and BMW are sponsoring the second 'season' (anyone remember when we used to call it a series?)

Anyway, I'm off to drive home in my 'BMW 3 season' now...

The world of motoring and attitudes towards car ownership have seen vast changes in the past couple of decades. Audi leasing may be far more popular and affordable than it once was, but there's still an abundance of 80s style closet scallies lurking in the woodwork, waiting to stick bits of plastic onto one car to make it look like another.

UK company 'Niche' are now offering a body kit for £8,800 that allows you to dress up your Audi TT and make it look like an R8!

With the real thing costing £78,195 it's an attractive proposition to people with full-blown vanity disease.

The package includes new alloys, lowered suspension, twin exhausts and the relevant plastic bulges.

With the UK climate shifting once again toward a temperature more forgiving to brass monkeys, Saab are pushing their 'wind deflector' add-on for the 9-3 convertible.

For what I've seen described as "JUST £349.95" (a bit like "It's JUST a flesh wound" from Monty Python's 'Holy Grail'), Saab lease customers can own this bit of kit which is said to reduce forward wind speed between the front seats, door and driver’s seat by a minimum of 75 per cent.

This is all well and good... if you live pretty much anywhere but the UK. When making an outright purchase for an item that you hope will benefit you repeatedly over time, it's always good to do a rough calculation and work out how much it's costing you each time you use it - like working out the price per day of your lease car, for example, even though you might pay monthly.

So let's do a rough estimate for the value of the Saab wind deflector...

Let's see, it costs £349.95...

Divide by the hours of glorious UK sunshine in one year...

That's roughly £349.95 per hour!

But then, if you have the kind of logic that led you to choose a convertible in the UK, you'll probably think that's a bargain!

If you park your lease Mercedes in the wrong spot in a city centre these days, it'll be towed away and crushed before you can say "It was an emergency, erm... I only had 2 minutes left to get a lottery ticket."

However, if you want to guarantee a good length of time between parking and crushing, it seems the best place to park is deep in a pillar in a French tunnel (come on, remember tragedy + time = comedy. I'm also banking on nobody actually owning up to being a shameless bandwagon Diana grief indulger. Out of the thousands of TV mourners who suddenly stopped slagging her off and decided they really really liked her now she was dead, I've never met one in person, have you?)

Yes, the vehicle at the centre of the most talked about tragedy of the 90s - Diana's Mercedes S-280 - is finally to be crushed now that the inquest into her death has ended over 10 years after the terrible events.