Audi dealers received a directive this month offering current EV lessees as much as $10,000 in incentive money, and dealerships an extra $500 per deal, tied to lease-end transactions on the brand’s electric lineup. The offer, dated September 1, 2026, expands a smaller version of the same program that started just two months earlier.

Key Points

• The incentive breaks down by model: up to $10,000 on the e-tron GT, $5,000 on the Q4 e-tron and $4,000 on the Q8 e-tron, according to CarsDirect’s reporting on the dealer bulletin.
• The Q4 e-tron figure alone jumped from $3,000 in July 2026 to $5,000 by September, a two-thirds increase in ten weeks, per CarsDirect and confirmed independently by autoevolution.
• Dealers also collect a $500 facilitation payment on every qualifying transaction, and the current offer is scheduled to run through the end of September 2026, per CarsDirect.
• Nationally, 243,000 franchise EV leases are set to expire in 2026, more than three times the volume that came due in 2025, according to J.D. Power.
• J.D. Power also projects EVs will lose 59% of their value over five years, compared with a 46% industry average across all vehicle types.

Why Audi Is Paying to Keep These Cars Off the Lot

Read the bulletin closely and the incentive isn’t cash to walk away, it’s cash to stay put: Audi wants lessees buying out and keeping the EVs they already have rather than handing the keys back at lease-end. That distinction matters more than it sounds like it should, because it tells you exactly what Audi is trying to avoid. A returned lease becomes used inventory the moment the keys hit the dealer’s counter, and used EVs are sitting in a market where residual values are cratering faster than gas cars. Paying a lessee $10,000 to keep an e-tron GT is cheaper for Audi than absorbing that vehicle back and reselling it at a steep loss against a depreciation curve that’s now running 13 points worse than the industry as a whole.

The timing lines up with a broader wave nobody in the industry is pretending isn’t coming. J.D. Power’s data shows a record 243,000 EV leases maturing in 2026, more than triple last year’s volume, right as the federal $7,500 EV tax credit’s expiration knocked new EV sales down 53% in a single month, October 2025, according to the same J.D. Power research. EV share of monthly new-vehicle sales fell from 12.9% to 6.0% during that stretch. Every one of those 243,000 expiring leases represents a decision point for Audi and every other automaker leasing EVs: pay now to keep the car in the customer’s driveway, or eat a resale loss on it later.

What This Signals

autoevolution’s coverage ties the incentive directly to the loss of the federal credit, noting the buyout offers are “more significant than ever” now that shoppers can’t lean on a tax break to soften a new purchase instead. A $10,000 check to keep a car nobody has to keep is not the move of a brand confident in what that same car would fetch back on its own lot. It’s the clearest kind of admission a company can make without ever putting out a press release that says so.