or, better still, have a menu option with APs for each car, where the AP varies based on how much mileage allowance you need.
What? Pay a higher AP and have Motability earning interest sat on your money for 3 years incase you dip into excess mileage charges? No thanks. If I was staying on the scheme it would be much better to pay the standard AP and save up the excess mileage charge in your own savings account and earn the interest yourself instead of swelling Motability’s coffers. Plus Motability winge currently about having to create two lots of AP pricing every quarter. Having to replicate that for your various mileage options, both for veterans APs and other APs would be a nightmare. Plus confuse customers even more.
We’ll have to agree to disagree @Mike What I am suggesting is that Motability adopt the same policy used by all other leasing companies and indeed all private buyers who take out a PCP (which, apparently, is the majority). The up front cost and/or monthly payment is determined by a mileage figure that the customer chooses. If you go over that you pay a surcharge that is a fraction of what Motability is now going to charge.
What Motability is proposing, and you are preferring, will cost higher mileage customers significantly more. It wouldn’t affect us even if we were staying with Motability, but it seems deeply wrong to me. All we’ve been hearing over the last 6 months is that Motability cars are used by lazy benefit scroungers who sit at home with fancy cars paid for by hard working taxpayers. Utter nonsense as we all know, but that’s the narrative. So, what do Motability do? They devise a system that seriously penalises disabled people who still work and contribute to society, by coming up with a punitive system that screws them over. Then, of course, there’s also those who live in more remote locations who know upfront that they will need a higher mileage allowance, so far better to just pay a reasonable additional AP and then not worry about any end of contract bill that will cost far more. I’d much rather pay £1k more AP to cover me for an extra 30k miles than have a bill for £7.5k at lease end, purely so that I can say that at least I earned a few hundred quid interest whilst saving the £7.5k!
I also dispute that it would be difficult to manage, given that every other leasing company does it!
Finally, there’s also the issue that doesn’t seem to have been considered. What happens at lease end when Motability says to the high mileage customer “you owe us £xxxx for your excess mileage” and the customer says “I don’t have that money”. There will end up being loads of defaulters who, whilst they will be kicked off the scheme, will add to the scheme costs for those who remain. That’s why all other lease companies have a different system where you choose your mileage range and if you go over the penalty is a fraction of what Motability will be pursuing customers for.