There is no doubt that one of the biggest advantages of being a Motability customer is not having sudden unexpected and potentially expensive bills, but we pay the same, if not more, through the scheme but in a different way.
Having had 5 Motability cars, around a dozen company cars and around 20 private cars over the years, some of the cheapest to run, once all costs are taken into account, have been the private ones.
Company cars aren’t free, as you get screwed by benefit in kind taxation and may have to pay an additional contribution over your allowance to get the car you want. As we know, with Motability you pay a now very sizeable AP to get anything remotely decent and then you sacrifice over £12,000 of benefits on top of that. Peace of mind comes at a big cost.
Our previous Motability car was a VW Tiguan 2.0TDi 190 Elegance. At about the same time as we took delivery of that car I bought a brand new BMW 520d Luxury Auto with £10k of options privately. When I sold the BMW, I worked out the total running costs (depreciation, insurance, servicing, tyres, breakdown cover etc) and, much to my surprise, the 5 Series (which was far superior than the Tiguan in every respect bar height and 4WD) had cost us slightly less to run privately than the far less desirable Volkswagen had cost us through Motability (and that was when APs were still reasonable, unlike today)
The gap is even more with cars at the cheaper end. A year or so ago I changed one of my daughter’s cars (Hyundai i20). I bought her a new one to replace the new one I’d bought her some years earlier. Again, doing the calculations of depreciation, insurance, servicing, tyres etc the car had cost one-third of what it would have cost to have run the same car through Motability.
The above two examples were on cars bought new, so comparable to getting a new car through Motability. For those happy to buy nearly new or used, the savings over having a Motabilty car can be massive. The cheapest car that I’ve ever run privately was, unbelievably, a BMW 750i Sport. I ran it for a year and sold it for more than I’d bought it for 😂
