How would the dealer not be losing profit ? Let’s say a motability customer cancelled an order a couple of days before collection and the dealer doesn’t have anyone to buy the car, they are left with a car for weeks/months. This is part of the reason that Motability customers are treated differently.
In the scenario that you describe that would be true. It’s also a myth (continually perpetuated by dealers) that they only get an arrangement fee for Motability orders. Yes, Motability only pay them a one off fee (around £200 from memory) BUT (and it’s a very important ‘but’) Motability orders count towards their dealership, group and manufacturer volume bonuses, so one lowly Motability order could be the clincher that triggers a significant bonus. I’ve managed to negotiate over £800 discount on our recently placed Motability order (combination of AP reduction and discount on optional extras) and you can be sure that the dealer will still be making a very good profit on our order!
I would agree that it’s very poor form to cancel an order once the car is built (unless the dealer has ordered the wrong specification, or the standard specification has changed since ordering), but in Daniels case he only ordered last week. It is highly likely that the dealership won’t have even got as far as securing a build slot allocation yet and even if they have, there will still be several months ahead when the order can be changed, so another customer can be slotted in to that order. In the highly unlikely case that the dealer doesn’t get another customer before the build is ‘locked down’, they can pass the order slot on to another dealership who, if they don’t have any build slots, will bite their hand off. That’s what happened to us. Our BMW dealership didn’t have any available order slots but managed to get a cancelled order from another dealership that wasn’t even in their group and changed the spec to what we wanted.
In the current climate, with severe delays due to covid related supply issues, I suspect that a lot of private customers are cancelling orders, so this isn’t an issue that’s unique to Motability customers.