Motability have told me all sales to them or to retail customer’s should be treated identically. I’ll wait to see if motability will do anything to help as I’ve not got much choice of other dealers.
Ed – The call centre staff at Motability Operations are always very friendly and polite, but they don’t have a clue about how car dealerships work in the real world. As an example, they don’t understand about build allocations, which are the cause of around 90% of the ordering problems that Motability customers report on this forum.
My understanding, from several articles that others have posted on this site, is that all fleet companies are experiencing problems now, not just Motability. If the dealer is telling you that if you are a retail customer then you will have a firm delivery date from the point that you order then that isn’t true. Whilst it is the case that retail customers are getting priority (due to the higher profit from those sales – most private customers being poor negotiators!) and may well get their cars quicker, delivery dates will still jump around and almost certainly be delayed as vehicle production is all over the place at present. Car dealers, rarely known for their integrity, might be seeing the current climate as an opportunity to push some fleet customers towards more profitable private sales by promising things that they cannot deliver.