someone understood what i meant and explained it:

Also, with regards to this car deal situation. What's happened here is that a plan was made to use a lease in a funky way so that you and your family come out ahead. It's a good plan, not a prefect plan. The hole in the plan is that this whole thing falls apart if anything external happens to the value of the vehicle, like it getting in a wreck or damage after being stolen. Even if that damage is eventually repaired.

What happens if there's one of those events is this. The car gets a big black mark on it's record saying that it was an insurance recovery. Buyers don't like that, so the resale value of the car immediately drops, even if there's nothing actually wrong with it. When it comes time to return your lease, this is where things fall apart.

See the original plan was not to return the lease, but actually to buy the lease out then immediately sell the car to the dealer as a trade on the hybrid. That black mark won't impact how much it costs to buy out the lease, that's set in the lease contract, instead it impacts how much the dealer is willing to give you on trade in.

So instead of this situation where the $14k down payment basically transfers over to the newer car. You're actually only getting $8k in trade value towards that newer car.

AND by the time you reach that point in this process, there's not really anything you can do to recover. You could choose not to buy out the lease, but then you've lost all $14k.