Just had a call from our nearest Volvo dealer to say that our test drive of the XC40 T5 Recharge booked for tomorrow is cancelled. Two reasons. One is that the dealer is losing its franchise as a new dealership (different owner) will be opening in a few months. Second reason (and this may be dealer BS but I will repeat it exactly as said to me) is that the XC40 is now affected by the semi-conductor shortage and all dealerships have been told that they cannot take any new orders. He specifically said ‘for Motability customers’ and I think he even said that some orders had been cancelled. When I pressed him on this and said, why just Motability and not retail, he said retail orders are affected as well. As I say, this may be utter BS but that’s what he told me.
It would have taken an awful lot to change to the XC40 from the BMW X1 after our 6 hours in two different X1’s over the last week and the things that I was concerned that I wouldn’t like about the XC40 have been confirmed by those who have driven it so far, so I’m not going to lose too much sleep over it (queue for the BMW haters to weigh in), but I know that the XC40 is a very popular car on the scheme and a lot of people are seriously considering it, so I do hope that what this dealer has told me turns out to be untrue. I’m hoping that as the X1 is quite dated now and doesn’t, for example, have a digital dash, that it won’t be affected by this semi-conductor issue, which seems to be getting quite widespread.