The actually make a ridiculously small amount of money for each order, I’ve been told as little as £50 per vehicle! That doesn’t even cover the cost of a couple of hours with the Motability specialist.
Bit of a non-sequitur. The vast majority of salesmen don’t care for the dealership numbers, why would they. A McDonalds burgerflipper isn’t interested in the target sales either, that’s a management issue, not for the guy who tries to sell you a car.
Before it’s brought up, the vast majority of salesmen in the UK just get paid an hourly rate. There’s no performance based rates (anymore). We talked about this with our current contact at Hyundai, when we originally ordered the car we were talking about why we didn’t immediately mention that we’re MB customers.
His reply was that it doesn’t matter at all. He gets a car out of the door, doesn’t matter who it goes to – it makes no impact on his salary. Of course, the branch manager may have a different idea (because for him, there is a difference between a MB and private customer, money wise) – but the average salesguy has no stakes.
We had one bad experience (and i went through quite a few dealerships for SEAT, Ford, VW, Skoda, Renault, Hyundai etc), with a VW dealership in Bridgend. We opted to bite the bullet and drove 40ish miles to the next one, where we then met a lovely lady (Denise in Port Talbot), who was as friendly as could be, made us feel welcome and even rolled out the red carpet when we picked up the car (complete with red bow on the bonnet etc in the “special pick up hall”).
Point being: if you’re getting awful service, it generally has more to do with the fact that you met a prick. Be it political views (“hurr free cars”), being a general muppet or simply a bad day, from our experience, there’s no systemic discrimination against a MB customer. Been with the scheme for 10 years now, and to roughly 15 dealerships of all kinds of marques (even a Mercedes one, we were looking at the GLA a long time ago) including countless test drives – and apart from that one guy at VW Bridgend (which, as we’ve been told in Port Talbot, isn’t popular with other employees either), we haven’t had a single bad experience.
Quite the opposite, indeed. We almost always got an in-situ test drive, usually for 60 minutes and unaccompanied, coffee etc. We had extended test drives (Golf GTE, 5 hours), we had offers for 24 and 48 hour test drives (Ford Explorer) without asking, in that case from the sales manager directly etc – at least here in south wales, there’s no noticeable difference. I don’t know how the vast majority of dealerships could’ve made us feel more welcome.
Prior: SEAT Ateca Xcellence Lux 1.5 TSI DSG MY19, VW Golf GTE PHEV DSG MY23
Current: Hyundai Ioniq 6 Ultimate
Next: we'll see what's available in 2028.