Belgian scale-up LIZY, a D’Ieteren subsidiary, has secured more than €300 million to expand its second-hand leasing model in Belgium, France, and the Netherlands. But the bigger story is what happens to the first mass wave of electric company cars when their initial lease contracts end.

The package is mainly debt: about €290 million from securitization and bank credit, plus €10 million in fresh equity from existing shareholders D’Ieteren, Belgium’s major automotive distribution and mobility group, and Alychlo, the investment vehicle of entrepreneur Marc Coucke.

The securitization, completed in June, bundles lease receivables from SMEs in Belgium and France, with ABN AMRO as senior investor and Pollen Street Capital as mezzanine lender. That matters because financiers are becoming comfortable funding cars that have already had a first life – including EVs whose residual values remain difficult to predict.

The EVs are coming back

Belgium is almost a laboratory for the problem. Renta members – the Belgian federation of leasing companies – had 195,990 electric passenger cars by mid-2025, representing 51% of all Belgian BEVs. And 73% of the new passenger cars they were ordering were zero-emission.

Those cars will increasingly be returned after three, four, or five years. Traditionally, the lessor sells or exports them. But private demand for used EVs has not grown as quickly as corporate electrification, putting residual values under pressure.

Renta itself has warned that Belgium still lacks a viable second-hand market for electric cars. LIZY’s answer is simple: don’t sell the car yet. Lease it again.

Instead of one lease followed by resale, LIZY wants cars to go through a second, and potentially a third, contract. The steepest depreciation has already occurred, which can allow a lower monthly rate. In H1 2026, 83% of its new contracts were electric.

Less about price, more about risk

LIZY did not invent second-hand leasing. Ayvens already offers 2life Lease in Belgium, putting selected cars returning from its roughly 80,000-vehicle fleet into another operational lease. Arval and others have comparable products abroad.

LIZY’s distinction is that second-life leasing is its core business and that it has now convinced institutional investors to finance the model on this scale.

Nor is used leasing automatically much cheaper. Depending on manufacturer discounts, a new EV can sometimes cost only a few dozen euros more per month. The stronger argument is that the customer avoids a large upfront investment and transfers maintenance and, crucially, residual-value risk to the lessor.

That appeals to SMEs and self-employed drivers, LIZY’s main customers. It could also attract private motorists. Someone buying a three-year-old EV today risks new-car price cuts or newer battery technology making it worth much less in four years. With operational leasing, that risk stays with the leasing company.

There is still an odd gap in that circular logic. A driver whose four-year EV lease expires cannot necessarily start a second-hand lease on the same car.

Arval Belgium, for example, lets corporate drivers buy their leased car at the end of the contract and extend lease terms. Still, its Re-lease program typically places selected returned cars into a new contract for another customer.

Yet keeping the same driver in the same car could be the simplest second cycle of all: no collection, no remarketing, and no unknown vehicle history, while the customer already knows exactly how the car has been treated.

Belgium missed the Private Lease boom

For now, Belgium remains overwhelmingly B2B. Renta counted just 16,074 Private Lease cars at the end of March 2026. That was 22% more than a year earlier, but only 3% of its members’ long-term passenger-car fleet. Just 1,255 were electric.

The contrast with the Netherlands is enormous. Its Private Lease fleet totaled 241,800 cars at the end of 2025, accounting for 2.6% of the country’s passenger-car fleet.

The segment grew explosively between 2013 and 2020 and has become a normal alternative to ownership. Almost 29% of new Dutch Private Lease registrations in 2025 were electric.

Part of the explanation is structural. Belgium’s leasing market developed around the company car. Many employees who might privately lease a car in the Netherlands already receive one through their employer in Belgium. Private motorists remain more attached to ownership. The Dutch market had room for a large consumer-leasing segment alongside corporate leasing.

That difference could now become an opportunity. Private Lease removes exactly the uncertainty that makes consumers hesitant about a used EV. Renta itself points to protection against unexpectedly low resale values as one reason why Belgian Private Lease is starting to grow.

A second life before resale

Second-hand leasing will not solve Europe’s used-EV problem on its own, nor will it always be the cheapest option. But it can buy the market time.

Instead of thousands of ex-company EVs hitting the used market simultaneously, part of that fleet can remain in professional leasing for a few more years, with residual-value risk borne by specialists rather than drivers.

LIZY’s €300 million package therefore says more than its headline suggests. The Belgian scale-up is betting that an EV does not necessarily need a buyer after its first lease – it may simply need another driver.