I understand where you are coming from, and it sucks that some dealers don’t seem to follow the guidelines or have appropriate test drive stock. But in the UK, crappy dealerships seem to exist everywhere, treating paying customers like crap, never mind the Motability ones. As long as the UK public rolls over and allows these cess pits of substandard service to thrive, then they will never go away.
With dealers I follow a simple enough rule, not helpful staff/no knowledge of the scheme or their own product/no decent test drive in the car I will lease via Motability? Then I go elsewhere. There are hundreds of them, really, they are like cockroaches…lol. I don’t expect the exact same spec of car for a test drive, it is unreasonable to expect a dealer to stock every trim/engine combo for every car in the range, but the engine, gearbox and seats should be the same – basically a class up or down from what I am looking at.
I am willing to travel up to 60 miles from my house, so that puts me in 3 cities and lots of towns, so its easy to try different dealers and cars well before the 3 month date, choose what I want and who I want to order it from. The good dealers really put the bad ones to shame, but all the more reason to use them. Why reward bad service? I went to over 25 dealers, only 3 were poor, only one was extremely poor.
You are also suffering a bit from the “computer says no” syndrome at Motability, lots of changes over your time with them, so their system flags that as unusual – which it is. Sadly, what it doesn’t do, without more digging, is look at why.
In life, it's not who you know that's important, it's how your wife found out.