@jojo22 Fair points. Different things affect different people.
The 10,000 annual mileage limit wouldn’t affect us as, since retiring, our annual mileage has dropped to around 8,500 miles a year. We’ve never needed more than 2 or 3 tyres during a lease. We’ve never taken a Motability car overseas. We would be exempt from the VAT on the AP from July as the car has a substantial adaptation.
The main reason that we are leaving Motability is that the choice of cars has reduced so much that there isn’t a single car left on the scheme that even remotely appeals to us. We aren’t interested in an EV and we have a PHEV currently that I find to be a faff and a compromise.
It’s fair to say that we are buying a car that is well above anything that would ever be on the scheme now or in the future, so private is the only route, but our previous Motability car was a BMW X1 2.0i, which was nowhere near as expensive as the company cars that I used to drive, but served us fine. I really enjoyed driving it, unlike the Hyundai that we have now that is a great car for people who aren’t in to cars! If modest BMWs were still available on the scheme we could have been tempted to stay with Motability, but we aren’t prepared to pay £13,000 in sacrificed benefits, plus AP, to drive around in an EV or something from China or similar. Life’s too short and luckily we are in a position to make that choice. We also don’t like the stigma that goes with being a scheme customer these days.
Even if the premium brands hadn’t been illogically culled for no other reason than optics, if the black box monitoring eventually gets rolled out to existing customers that could have been another tipping point. My youngest daughter had one for her first year of driving and I was on edge every time that I drove the car!