I’ve long argued with Motability that there should be no financial penalty for needing an automatic over a manual.
There should be a difference in AP depending on the spec level and fuel of the vehicle… so a basic level car would be different from the top of the range and petrol, diesel, hybrid, BEV would affect it too.
But they know how many vehicles are auto and how many are manual and it’d be easy to adjust the AP to balance this out. Last time I spoke about it (a good few years ago now?) it was a tiny percentage of all cars were automatic but that’ll have changed (maybe someone knows?)
It’d be easy enough to add £1, £5, £10, £50 or whatever to ever manual car in that models lineup to reduce the price of the automatic.