See NY publication 839. It looks like NY requires that taxes on the amount of vehicle you are using be paid at lease inception. So for example, if you leased and the cap cost minus residual was $20k, you would pay NY state and local taxes on that amount. NY only refunds taxes on a lease in event of a lemon law enforcement. So if doing early buyout after 1 month of leasing, you would have to pay taxes on the entire buyout quote resulting in around $1,800 more than if you went the purchase option. If the taxes were financed in your lease (and remitted to NY upfront by the dealer/lessor) there is probably some way that the dealer covers themselves getting that money back. Doing a 2 year lease (currently, $9400 lease cash, or maybe plus an additional $1k, $10400 total if available on gt2 awd) may make sense even if you were to not do buyout early and simply buyout at lease end. Especially if you can get a money factor of less than 0.002.
Very interesting Rob, i am located in NY as well and am having trouble calculating everything. I think this helps, so my understanding is we will probably pay an extra 1700-2300 in taxes depending on the final numbers if we do a lease buyout, and we would pay the fee of $950 to buyout the lease early. So it would essentially be lease cash amount minus around 2800 would be our total cost.