[Avodah] Business Halacha - Auto Lease

[kennethgmiller at juno.com]

Cantor Henry Topas brought a case:

> Reuven leases a car from Shimon's leasing company.
> The lease stipulates that upon the end of the lease
> term, the vehicle must have a value of $30,000.

You seem to be interpreting this to mean that when the lease ends, and Reuven returns that car to Shimon, he will be required to make sure that it is worth $30,000 at that time.

That's not how I understand auto leases to work. Rather, at the time of lease origination, a value is stipulated in advance, and when the lease ends, Reuven has the exclusive option of returning the car or paying the $30,000, regardless of what anyone thinks the car is actually worth.

Moreover, I don't know if a lease CAN work the way the OP suggests. Reuven has no control over market forces. There's no way he can promise, years in advance, how the market will value his car a few years down the line. He can promise that the car will not have more than a normal amount of wear-and-tear. But he cannot control whether this car will turn out to have some sort of defect which causes the value to tumble, such as in many of today's Toyota. Nor can he control gasoline prices, which caused gas-guzzlers to tumble a few years back.

So here's the question as I see it: Shimon can agree that when the lease is up, Reuven will have the option of returning the car or paying $30,000 in lieu of that car. But does halacha (or civil law) allow Reuven to obligate himself to $30,000, payable either in full or by returning the car plus an amount of money to be determined at that date? --- Well, now that I've phrased it in those terms, I suppose it can indeed work like that. But I don't think it is actually done in that way, because the leasing company is much more able to take the gamble than the consumer is.

Akiva Miller

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