While lease rates have been on the decline for some time now, both Ford and Lincoln have historically bucked that trend by enjoying some of the higher lease percentages in the industry. In Q3 of 2024, 51.84 percent of Lincoln customers took out a loan to pay for their vehicle, versus 48.16 percent that chose to lease it instead, which was a bit higher than Q2, when leasing accounted for 42.4 percent of all transactions. However, the majority of Lincoln buyers opted to finance their new vehicle in Q4 2023 as well, according to Experian’s latest State of the Automotive Finance Report.
While an overwhelming majority of Ford brand customers opted to finance rather than lease in the final quarter of 2023 – 80.23 percent versus 18.63 percent – 44.73 percent of Lincoln shoppers opted to lease rather than finance, compared to 55.27 percent that financed their new vehicle purchase. That’s relatively on par with the brand’s luxury rivals as well, unsurprising since that particular segment has long shown a strong preference for leases. In fact, many of Lincoln’s rivals – including BMW, Mercedes-Benz, Acura, Infiniti, and Audi – all returned higher lease rates than FoMoCo’s luxury arm in Q4 of 2023, according to this particular report.
Meanwhile, according to this same report, while automotive leases as a whole took a dive between 2020 and 2022, that form of vehicle ownership has since rebounded in a big way through the course of 2023, according to Experian. Interestingly, it’s the customers that have higher credit scores that are opting to lease versus finance as well – in fact, 56 percent of lessees in Q4 2023 had credit scores higher than 741 after making up 34.88 percent of the overall market last year as a whole.
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