We covered much of this back when the program came out on a prior thread. The Ducati Premier program is NOT designed to be a way for you to have a lower TOTAL COST OF OWNERSHIP for a new Ducati vs. using traditional financing. It's purely a program designed to offer lower payments on a new Ducati than with traditional financing. If you are not a payment buyer then there's no real reason for you to consider this program. If however, you are a monthly cashflow person (like 50% of us) then the monthly payment is important, and you view how much you pay for month as the deciding factor on what you can buy. You might pay a little more interest, but it's the difference between being able to buy the bike with a comfortable payment or not. As far as the residual balloon amount on the program, Ducati Financial Services has been very conservative with the residuals. They don't want, and we as dealers don't want, people to come trade bikes in that they are upside down on. That is our worst nightmare and certainly not something that we would ever want to encourage or purposely set up. It's not a guaranteed value, but the intent is that the majority of owners who put average miles on their bike will come back in and either be at break-even or have a small amount of equity in the bike. That's what Ducati wants and it's what we as dealers want. If you put a lot of miles on your bike, then yeah, your bike may not be worth as much, same goes if it has been damaged or abused. Your obligations on the loan are exactly the same as if you used traditional financing, you are responsible for the full price of the bike at the end, which you either pay, refinance, or you trade out. It's not better or worse than traditional financing when it comes to what happens when you come trade it back in 3 or 4 years down the road. If you're a person who typically keeps your bike for 4+ years, then you're likely to go with traditional financing. The average Ducati owner is around 2.5-3 years, which is why this program works well for the brand.
As far as why Ducati launched this program, despite the rambling on this thread, it had nothing to do with Ducati wanting to "do anything" to the buyers who use the program, "screw" people, "trap" people, etc. This program was launched for one reason, and that reason was that the dealers who had to compete against the S1000RR in sales were losing a crap ton of business because they couldn't offer as low of a monthly payment on an 1198 (and then a Panigale) than BMW was. Dealers pushed for this for over 5 years before it was finally launched, and much of that delay was due to the transition from the prior factory lender over to the VW-backed Ducati Financial Services. Look at the sales volume of the S1000RR since it was launched, BMW hit an absolute home run with the 3Easy Ride financing program with that bike. It sold at least double what it would have had they not offered that financing, because it put the bike on par with monthly payment vs. a Japanese liter bike. A huge percentage of the buyers of that bike were not previous European bike owners, they were conquest sales from prior Japanese liter bike owners. Brilliant!
