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I appreciate all the comments, thank you.
The difference between what may lay ahead and previous manufacturer ‘exits’ from the Motability scheme, is software.
Silent updates and OTA patches are so frequent these days that limping by to the end of a lease period is unlikely to be practical now, and depreciated software would become an open door to thieves and hackers.
I’ll let you know what Motability Operations say when / if I get a reply to my letter (just posted).
John
Thanks for the initial thoughts folks,
I do plan the contact Motability if this issue can’t be resolved with the manufacturer through the dealership. I don’t want to escalate things prematurely if they manage to resolve matters for themselves though. I have checked whether there is a cooling off period after entering into a Motability lease, which there isn’t, which is helpful at one level but surprising at another.
I appreciate the comments about checking that the features that we wanted were included with the (base) model that we had selected, which we did. And the dealer thought that they were included too, although on checking back through the bulletins that the maker sends to their dealerships they found out that the feature was withdrawn in March 2021 for this model (there are links in the manudfacturer’s website that would lead to feature lists for this car, which are broken at this point and lead nowhere).
So any “fault” for miss-selling would lay with the dealer, not the maker. How things would then stand between the supplier (the dealer), the provider (Motability) and the hirer (us) is not clear to me, from a legal standpoint.
This feature has been included as standard in all models across the range since the car was launched in 2010. It was only a few months ago that it was withdrawn for the base model only, presumably to provide further feature differentiation across the range.
The ironic thing is that the feature is activated by registering the car’s VIN in the manufacturer’s app, which then makes it available to the user. The capability for remote temperature control is still present in the car’s hardware and software, and could be restored again in no time and at no cost to anyone, if the maker was to add our VIN to their feature database.
We have still to hear from the dealer, and I don’t expect that will happen until the first weeks of the New Year. My concern in the meantime was to make sure that the clock was not ticking down on a lease hire cooling off period, which it doesn’t appear to be.
John
