This issue crops up all the time on this forum and almost always means that the dealer hasn’t ordered the car yet as they don’t have any available build allocation slots, or those that they do have, have been allocated to private customers.
Just to clear up one thing mentioned on this thread that confuses people. Anything from Motability (whether online or paper) that shows your new vehicle is NOT an order or even confirmation of an order. It is merely showing you that Motability has agreed that the dealership can order this car for you. The order itself is an entirely different process. You cannot see this on the Motability website at any stage and Motability staff have no knowledge of it either. That’s why if you ever call Motability regarding the progress of your order they will just tell you to speak to the dealership or the manufacturer, because they have no visibility of the order progress whatsoever. Anticipated delivery dates are a best guess from a dealership and mean nothing. They certainly aren’t confirmation that you car has actually been ordered.
The way it works is that when you go into a dealer and you think that you have ordered a car, you haven’t. You have merely said that you want to order that car. Whilst you are there, the dealer inputs your request onto the Motability system. Motability agree that you can order that car at the AP quoted. You leave the dealership thinking that you have ordered a car, but you haven’t. The actual order is something that happens between the dealership and the manufacturer and may not happen until many months after you think you have ordered the car. Dealerships are allocated a limited number of ‘build allocation slots’ for each type of car each month. There will be other customers in the queue who ordered before you (sometimes many months before you) who will be allocated a slot before you are allocated one.
Nine times out of ten the dealership will not be honest with you about whether they have actually ordered your car. They will imply that they have and will just blame long delays on the manufacturer. In an ideal world, when a Motability customer goes into a showroom to order a car, the dealer would say something like “We are happy to accept your order, but we have 20 orders ahead of you and we are currently getting around 5 build slot allocations for that particular car every month, so it’s likely to be 4 months until we can even place the order for you”. Of course, they won’t say that because you will then shop around and could find a dealer where the wait may be much less, or a dealer where there may even be no wait at all if they have no backlog of orders for that particular car. So dealers imply that they can order the car now but in reality often sit on your order for months until they can actually place it.
The above explains why two different customers on this forum can order the same car on the same day at two different dealerships and one gets the car in 6 months and the other gets the car in 9 months. In the latter case, the dealer wasn’t able to actually place the order until 3 months later than the first dealer due to their backlog of orders versus their build allocation slots.
So, what do you do? Two things. Firstly, when you want to order a car, ask the dealership where they are with “build allocation slots” for the specific model of car that you want and if they don’t have an immediately available slot ask how many months it is likely to be until they can actually place your order with the manufacturer. Don’t be afraid to shop around different dealerships. The answers you will get (if they are being honest) will vary by many months. Secondly, make it clear that you want a manufacturer order number as soon as the dealer is able to place the order. This is NOT the number on any order paperwork (that is a dealer order number for internal use only and is not an actual order with the manufacturer) and it is also nothing to do with Motability so is never visible to them. Only when you get a manufacturer order number that enables you to contact the manufacturer to ask for a progress update has your order actually been placed.