Every so often a business comes along that does things a little bit differently. AutoCompanion might just fit that bill. They’re hooking up customers with lease deals, which isn’t so strange. The weird bit is that they’re doing it with a spreadsheet.
Buying a new car is cool if you can afford it. You get to own the whole thing, and you can do whatever you want with it once it’s paid off. Leasing has its charms, though. It can be an easier way to get yourself into a new set of wheels on the regular, without having to go through the whole churn of selling your existing car every time you want to upgrade.
Fundamentally, though, a good lease gets you a good car at a tasty monthly price. Some of the deals from AutoCompanion are quite exciting in that regard. Most are only available to East Coasters, though the company is branching out to work with BMW, Hyundai, and Audi deals on the west coast.
Click through the website and you’ll find your way here—to this Google Spreadsheet link. Open it up, and you’ll find page after page of pre-negotiated lease deals sorted by brand and location. You can then click the “Calc link” which shows you how the deal pencils out in real numbers for your chosen lease term, mileage, and relevant incentives.
It’s a funny way of doing business. Most companies would have found a way to display the same information in a web interface. Nonetheless, the system works, and it lets you flick through the available leases at your leisure.
There are some neat scores on the books if you know what you’re looking for. In the northeast of the country, Hyundai Ioniq 5 leases are getting close to the magic number of $300 a month. That’s in part due to juicy EV lease incentives that are currently on the books. If you’re looking for a gas model instead, Tuscons and Elantras can be had for under $300 a month, or a Palisade for under $500 a month if you want something bigger.
There are some tempting Hondas on the sheet, too. An Accord lease might set you back less than $300 a month if you play your cards right. A little more cash might get you a CR-V, or even a Ridgeline, the forgotten mid-size truck everyone thinks is sort of okay.
The spreadsheet’s Hot Deals tab offers a Volkswagen ID.4 for under $350 a month if you’re looking for something electrifyingly German. Meanwhile, if you’re looking for something more luxurious, Audi currently has e-Tron 55s going out the door for 36-month leases at less than $600 a month, which isn’t bad at all. You can potentially snag an e-tron GT for not a whole lot more if you’re in the right part of the country. If you’re eager to go more exotic, there are deals for Mercedes, Maseratis, and Porsches too.
Once you’ve run the calculations and found something you like, you can just fill out the inquiry form to get the ball rolling. AutoCompanion will then help you close your pre-negotiated deal and source your car. It’s worth noting that there is a broker fee to pay—usually $699. Once the deal is done, you can pick up the car locally, or you can arrange to have it shipped if so desired.
If you’ve always wondered about a lease, but you didn’t want to mess around negotiating, you might find this business model appealing. That’s the benefit of a pre-negotiated deal—you know what you’re getting into from the drop!
Image credits: AutoCompanion
The Ridgeline is not sort of ok. When you compare it to everything else it’s genuinely underwhelming.
Lewin’s an honorary Brit and he didn’t mention LingsCars? WTF???
Which nominally still belongs to the UK
Big Ass-Spreadsheet heh heh hehehehehehe
I e-mailed three local dealers and got a $299/month lease (10k miles/yr, $0 down) on an AWD Ioniq 5 SEL.
I almost went to a lease broker, but he was very vague about the kind of deals he could get, so I contacted dealers directly and had an acceptable offer within a couple of emails.
Went to the dealer, and they actually stuck to the deal they had offered me (I went in expecting to walk out after being offered something different than discussed).
If not for the CDK hack and the resulting backlog at the registry caused by dealers submitting their paperwork as actual physical paperwork, it would have been a smooth painless transaction.
I don’t know what more a broker could have found for me.
The lease/deal game is a classic YMMV situation. Sometimes good deals are just there…sometimes they aren’t.
When I was shopping around metro Detroit for an EV, not much turned up. Ended up getting an Ioniq 6 for $244mo for 24/24,000 via a broker. Sure, I had to pay the broker – but I also didn’t have to play the dealer game. Also, the transaction took about 45min at the dealer, so there was some benefit there.
I think they can also offer some benefit in terms of sourcing the spec/trim/color you want as well.
It’s a good option to explore – sometimes it’s a better deal, sometimes it might not be.
If I had run into any difficulty finding something suitable, I would have gone to the broker.
But there were over 400 Ioniq 5 SEL’s in inventory within 50 miles of here, including 40+ in my desired trim / color / interior. Finding the right one wasn’t going to be an issue.
After clicking on the spreadsheet, I now realize the true genius of this. Since I’m logged in to Google, they now know my name and presumably email so they can track me as a sales prospect.
The amount of companies so heavily reliant on Excel is ludicrous. They need to let the nerds be nerds and get the data in the correct type of system. Excel is no better than stone tablets; It’s just faster. Meta-Data is king. Let us do it!
Signed, Nerd.
I’ll take a company that operates on spreadsheets vs Quickbooks any day of the week.
IDK squat about QuickBooks, but is it actually a database? Or just more glorified calculators with forms?
It’s a glorified invoice generator and it’s insane people try to run a business that needs to track inventory and sometimes even manufacturing BOMs with it.
The guy who came in to clean up FTX was floored when he found they ran the company on Quickbooks
Holy shit! That’s how you know you’re dealing with a scam company.
As a software engineer, I agree that big data needs to lie somewhere else and that the entire company should not be run from an Excel spreadsheet—which too many are—but Excel is what a lot of business and accounting people know, and I’m fine with them using it to massage portions the data into a final, digestible form, or to manipulate it for their own local purposes.
Think of Excel as the “last-mile delivery” of data, if you will.
I realize that, but doing so takes all of the validity of the data into the hands of people it probably shouldn’t be in. It’s uncontrolled at that point.
For sure. And I don’t think enough people utilize the functionality within Excel that can pull data from SQL or even No-SQL databases. I agree that the database needs to be the One True Source of data, and not Kristy’s Excel Sheet that gets emailed back and forth between twenty people every month.
Bingo!
But, even when connected to SQL, it’s one click away from being uncontrolled.
Getting the non-technical folks off of Excel is a losing battle.
It’s a tough battle. It can and must be won if these companies truly want to progress.
This right here is exactly what I use it as. And it works great for exactly this. My excel sheet is also not shared with anyone because it’s just a way to digest the database and re-publish to the wider databases
A placed I worked at migrated critical activity logging from spreadsheets to a web app. Along the way, it was discovered the template had some math errors that caused it to report incorrect cost calculations. Some of those “uncontrolled” copies had even more substantial issues, but they were screwed from the get go by the validated template that wasn’t correct.
Of course few things beat the fiasco at an insurance company I worked for. They migrated to a new platform and had separate teams handle the premium side vs the losses side, and each team interpreted the new coding scheme differently. We ended up with oddities like Boiler coverage on auto policies (and no, we’re not talking about Stanley Steamers or some other sort of steam powered vehicles).
Every quarter, we had to submit financials to some agency, who then aggregated everybody’s data and published the results. Rumor was they received our file, recorded the fact that we’d supplied the legally required report, and then promptly threw it in the trash so as to not pollute their final averages.
My point being, you can screw up more than just spreadsheets. Just ask our friends in the UK about Horizon.
Yes, it can get screwed up. It’s all in one spot, not 25 different peoples spreadsheets.
But the root cause of that is not that the web app sucks and that excel should have continued, the root cause is someone put the wrong calculations in and then someone else didn’t validate them. They had the validation check in hand; the excel book.
I thought it should, too. At my last stop, it was announced that we would be going enterprise-wide to G-Suite. Please add feedback or questions in the discussion section.
Uhhhh…. The number of people that ran multi-million dollar portfolios and PROCESSES through Excel resulted in a quick run to my stock account to make some ‘adjustments’
The sad thing was that the people thought moving to G-suite was the problem, not that they were doing what they were doing.
I agree, but I also want to acknowledge the potency of spreadsheets in the hands of a competent software engineer. While the medium tends to get press for complicated nightmare scenarios, it does allow direct manipulation and visualization of 2D data structures & functions, something which traditional programming languages leave to the developer or IDE.
In a sense, it epitomizes the idea of data-driven development, but because it is ubiquitous and so powerful, there is an abundance of examples of business-critical failures and other horror stories that are the result of undisciplined development practices and organizations that are blind to complexity and risk assessment.
This is really well worded. Thanks for recognizing those of us using it correctly. Excel gets a bad rap from being poorly used by the inexperienced
I’m still advocating for the correct use of it. I too am a form of a developer and we use it all the time.
Edit: I decided this isn’t a hill I want to die on
The need a branch office in Kanukistan RFN.
This is a great use of a spreadsheet, imho. I am not really that familiar with Google Sheets but use Excel quite extensively. If I was designing this, I’d use some formulas and VBA to script in some kind of query mode and dynamic table (probably using filter) to make it a little easier to navigate. However I have no idea if Sheets supports anything like that.
Spreadsheets are powerful and widely misunderstood. Some of my spreadsheets look nothing like spreadsheets and are configured for very specific purposes. Not everyone has a web programming background and can whip up a website, but with some time and effort, just about anyone can make a really nice spreadsheet.
You could dive down the rabbit hole of google apps script and python. You can do all sorts of sheets magic with them.
Excel is a calculator not a database and dashboard tool.
Actually, it’s a database.
By what definition?
It got bastardized into doing everything because it’s cash cow for Microsoft and a bunch of smooth brained MBAs refuse to let technologists do their job because they can’t learn the right way to do something.
Oh, I’m sorry, I was just making a joke…it’s not a database (Access is barely a good database but it’s at least intendedto be used as one) but it’s so often used like one the lines might get blurry.
Got it. It’s Friday of a long week. Sarcasm is hard to read. 🙂
After a couple of minutes I started to wonder if you were being sarcastic.
Totally understand.
Although I wouldn’t call Excel a calculator, it definitely was not designed to be a DB tool. That what Access is for. However sometimes Excel is the best way to create what are effectively mini-databases, especially for my company as we transition to a comprehensive EHR product with actual SQL databases.
What it is designed for is manipulating data, and it is fantastic at that.
What? It’s whole existence is founded in crunching numbers. The definition of spreadsheet uses the word calculation. Now you can calculate with more than just numbers, but that’s still a calculator.
No offense, but I’m terrified that you’re using excel for EHR….How the hell do you control the data?!
While I don’t love the Blazer EV, it’s saying I could get one for like $215 per month for a 36 month 12,000 annual mileage if I’m following the spreadsheet correctly, and the following page it directs me to. That is tempting…
I used them for my Ioniq 6 lease a few weeks back. First time doing anything like that…wasn’t really sure what to expect. Felt slightly sketchy at times, but ended up being completely legit & a great experience.
They’re just a broker, more or less – many other people/firms do the same thing. But I would 100% go this route again – you can probably do marginally better if you go it alone and know what you’re doing…but I found it to be well worth the $1000 broker fee.
Great group. I have multiple family and friends that have utilized them as well. There is a fantastic forum for lease assistance called leasehackr. A lot of knowledgeable folks and experienced brokers that can assist in finding a good deal. As Detroit Lightning mentions, there is a chance you could do slightly better but these deals are really good so you have to evaluate the value of your time.
One important thing to consider with leasing is the number of variables that play into the total monthly cost for the lease. Lease transactions can be substantially more complex than a purchase/finance.
Yup, I discovered them via leasehackr, which is totally amazing if not slightly intimidating. But for the most part, people over there are very cool and helpful.