I can’t thank you all enough for Your words and advice etc. It’s not the best experience in the world, but I have to remember I’ve survived so so so much worse. I’ll be finding out more this week, but I’m assuming as I don’t have the vehicle to “replace” that motability won’t supply a courtesy and DS are passing the buck left right and Centre . Also now it seems attempting to get a different car would take even longer. Thank you all xxx
Here’s a tip that we found out two days ago. It’s not a guarantee, but certainly does match our experiences.
I don’t know where you’re based, and it does sound rather weird, but if you can: go to a dealership that is in a less.. “affluent” area. We recently scavenged through multiple VW dealerships – two of them in “better parts” of the area, and one of them “in the valleys”.
The one in the valleys blew the other two out of the water big time. Starting from the fact that the one in the valleys actively advertised Motability on the outside with multiple big posters (the other two didn’t mention motability at all anywhere), there were a few key differences. The two salesmen in the more affluent areas got rather “short” with us once they heard that we’re looking into Motability cars, and after mentioning that we’d want a few extras and different wheels on the car we were looking at, immediately got huffed at pointing out that we have to pay for (quote) “every single thing you add extra”.
Whereas in the valleys, after we said that we’re with Motability, he immediately said that most of their customers are indeed Motability customers, and it doesn’t make a difference to them (offered tea and coffee as well, which the other two didn’t). We sat down and talked for more than half an hour, whereas in the other two we were talking less than two minutes to the salesmen, they basically just pulled the demonstrator car out of the bay, chucked the key at us, told us how to put it in forward and buggered off. On top of that, and that’s the important bit, the dealership in the valleys offered us in-stock cars, not just factory orders. That means that if we go for the Golf GTE (which is likely), instead of waiting almost a year for delivery, we could have one of the cars they have on the lot (all of course brand new cars). We also inquired about courtesy cars in case our new one needs to come in for more than 3 hours (the dealership isn’t local to us, we drove 100 miles total to get there), and they happily ensured us that while they can’t guarantee another GTE as courtesy car, they won’t let us walk off the lot if the car needs to go in (and we don’t care if it’s a basemodel VW Up! for a day as long as we don’t need to walk/train home).
The reason here being that “poorer” areas don’t sell as many new cars, so a Motability order is better than no order at all – so they actually make an effort and treat you as a proper customer. Admittedly, we don’t have actual physical proof for it, but that certainly is our personal experience.
If you’re in south Wales, i couldn’t recommend Capitol VW in Merthyr Tydfil more (in fact, after googling, they were recommended here multiple times before over the years, didn’t know beforehand though). There’s other dealerships there too, i think Nissan and a few more that i can’t recall – i assume the “customer care for motability users” will be equally good in the other ones there.
Prior: SEAT Ateca Xcellence Lux 1.5 TSI DSG MY19, VW Golf GTE PHEV DSG MY23
Current: Hyundai Ioniq 6 Ultimate
Next: we'll see what's available in 2028.