Can a dealer hold a preregistered new car until 3 months old.

[Nick@]

I visited a Seat dealership yesterday and saw a Seat Arona FR Special edition that I liked. It had been registered. The sales person said that if I purchased the car, I could not take delivery until early November as that is when Seat will allow the dealer to release the car. They hold onto them in the dealership until it is 3 months after registration. This sounds very odd and not something I have known with any other manufacturer. The car had 10 miles on the clock.
Is this normal practice or are they pulling a fast one?

 

[H Rafiq]

I’m assuming they’ll have a quota of cars to release baring a certain registration year. Are you in the UK? Here new registrations are released twice a year, in March and September. I’ve been offered a cheaper ‘new’ car deal if I agreed to have it delivered in March, but with the registration mark of the September of the previous year (I had a 68-reg Polo delivered in March 2019, but it was still brand new). Make sense?

 

[Loadmaster748]

Yes they can, I had that same scenario with a Hyundai 130N which had been registered on 1st April this year and couldn't be released for three months. That was Hyundai UK's requirement, not the dealer's.

I didn't take it any further from there.