With 36 month only leases I can’t see many people opting for the high end AP.
I would, but only because I’ve never considered lease extensions to be good value, so I always assume that we will only have the car for 3 years anyway.
In the past, the cars with the highest APs were usually the best value cars on the scheme (if you work out the AP plus sacrificed benefits as a percentage of the cars list price). Conversely, cars with nil AP were often the poorest value, as the £12k sacrificed benefits were a much bigger percentage of the cars price.
However, that’s all been turned on its head in recent years, not least with the arrival of some expensive EVs at very keen APs. There are currently a lot of very mediocre cars with very high APs that, once added to the £12k benefits, are not worth it IMHO. If we were changing today we would leave the scheme. Not because of this policy change, but because there isn’t a single car on the scheme that would interest me!
Hopefully that situation may improve by the time we are due to change as I’d rather have a car through Motability, but £12k plus a high AP is a lot of money that I can put towards something better than I can get through Motability. I also don’t feel the need to have a brand new car (which is only brand new for a short while anyway), although if we do go down the new car route we can get the VAT off the purchase price (inc options) and servicing and maintenance costs, which would help.
