Given that we are lead to believe that Motability customers are waiting an eternity for new cars whilst private customers are getting them in a fraction of the time, I thought that I would share my experience of my visit to my local Hyundai dealership this morning as a private customer.
In 2016 I bought one of my daughters a new i20 Premium from this dealership and I am considering buying her a new car now that it is going to be 6 years old in March. I was looking at the new i20 and also the Ioniq self charging hybrid. I was told that the wait for a new i20 is currently around 22 weeks and there are none in stock to be had (I would want the Ultimate model). As for the Ioniq, there was a slim chance that one might be in stock somewhere but if it wasn’t the colour or spec (Premium SE) that we wanted, we would be looking at July next year. So no better as a private cash customer than a Motability one from what I could tell
I also asked about trade in prices as I’ve noticed that my daughters current i20 has jumped in value by well over £2k recently. He stated that as used car values are so over inflated by £2-3k at present, they would give a guide trade in price now but would revalue within a month of the new car arriving and to expect a big drop of several thousand pounds between now and then. If we weren’t comfortable with the price we could walk away and have a full refund of the deposit.
So, all is not rosey as a private customer at present and keep in mind that this is Hyundai, who are far less affected by the chip shortage than most manufacturers!