Would be nice if the manufacturers could just give some clear information on their intentions for reintroducing their cars/ specific models. Businesses don’t make ad hoc decisions, these things will be planned months in advance so it’s difficult to understand why Motability themselves don’t have clearer info – even a rough timeframe – that they could share with people in the scheme.
That sort of information would generally be classed as commercially confidential or commercially sensitive information. Hence not made publicly available.
There are many reasons for this, amongst which are:
Current production difficulties meaning that the manufacturer may not yet know when they can reliably and continually begin to supply fleet customers without impinging on the more profitable retail sales (which are currently taking production slots due to profitability).
The loss of confidence in the brand if they did announce a date to restart supplying fleet/Motability customers, but then cannot fulfil the orders or have such long lead times that complaints start flowing.
The fact that if a buyer’s heart is so set on a certain vehicle which is not available as a fleet/Motability sale, the buyer may become a more profitable retail customer.
Then you have to look at the say the Motability Scheme. With the ongoing large rises in Advance Payments, do they want to put on more premium brands with ever higher AP’s which maybe off putting to customers – read the number of posts hereabouts from customers thinking of leaving the scheme due to very high AP’s. Often the economics simply do not stack up of putting an ultra high AP vehicle on the scheme (and look what happened in times past when they did have such premium vehicles on the scheme).