Lease Return Inspections

Gary Wray has handled well over a thousand lease return inspections over the years. His advice on what to expect -- and what to do about it -- is worth hearing before the transporter arrives.

When you return a lease car, the finance company rarely sends an inspector to your door. What actually happens is a transporter comes to collect it. The driver will do a quick walk-round and note any obvious damage -- mainly to cover himself, not on behalf of the lease company. The car then goes to auction, and that is where it gets properly inspected, usually alongside a batch of others coming off lease at the same time.

The charges you receive are a mixture of devaluation and repair cost, and it shifts depending on what the damage is. Scuffed wheels are a good example: when we first started doing lease return inspections, the charge was around £120 per wheel. Now there are contractors working the auctions who will touch in a small area cheaply -- trade price, not a full refurbishment. The charge for a scuffed wheel has dropped to around £40 as a result. If you went and had it done properly yourself beforehand, you would probably still pay £120. Knowing which damage to fix and which to leave is far more complicated than it looks -- and it is exactly the kind of thing we can advise on, because we know where the thresholds sit.

The lease company does not repair everything; much of it goes through the auction as-is, and the charge reflects what they think it cost them. That matters if you want to dispute anything: by the time you get the bill, the car has already been sold and belongs to someone else. There is nothing left to inspect, and no way to prove that a scuff happened in the auction car park rather than on your watch.

What Actually Gets Charged

In practice, lease companies are generally fair -- but the checklist is longer than most people expect. We go through it all with you: bonnet, boot, moonroof, spare wheel, locking wheel nut. That last one catches people out regularly. It falls behind the spare and sits there for four years, and a missing locking wheel nut key can cost around £500. A crack in a moonroof -- a firework hit it, you never noticed -- runs to about £1,000. A carpet worn through by high heels is typically around £400.

Other common charges: the spare key that ended up in a kitchen drawer, scuffed alloy wheels, dents above the threshold, boot scuffs from years of loading and unloading, claw marks and dog hair, the smell of smoke or dog, and tyres that are the right size but not the manufacturer-specified brand written into the lease agreement.

The £1,400 Christmas Bill

We hear from people after the fact more than we should. A neighbour of one of our customers got an invoice for £1,400 two weeks before Christmas -- completely unexpected. By then it was too late to do anything. The car had already been auctioned. The lease company sent the contract the customer signed when they took it out, and that contract sets out the fair wear and tear terms. There is no argument to have at that point.

Our job is to make sure the car goes back in a condition that keeps you under the threshold -- so the small bits of damage that remain are not worth the cost of the paperwork to chase. If you have had a pre-return inspection with us, we will have logged the condition of the car in full. If a dispute does arise, we can fight your corner with a documented record of exactly what the car looked like when it left you.

Bring the car in about a month before the return date if you can. Half an hour, we go through the checklist with you, and you leave knowing exactly what you are looking at -- and what is worth doing about it. If you have left it late, call us anyway; we will do our best to fit you in.