if MG customer services definitely confirmed, that's that; it seems that some dealerships decide to do it for free for their own reasons ... maybe because it's not costing them any extra, maybe they have spare capacity, hoping for return custom ...
generally speaking - one thing to bear in mind is that different circumstances might apply to different cars and different people on this forum. What I get with my car, someone else might not be entitled to for whatever reason, expired warranty, different vehicle specifications ...
It’s a bit of a “crap shoot game” really.
Some get it done FOC and some do not.
This is no different to the attitude that MG’s adopted when they released the comfort 2 update for the Gen1 ZS EV.
They classed the update as a pure “improvement” over the original software that the car was released with from the factory, saying that the car worked perfectly well without it done.
This was a clever way of bundling the totally necessary updates, with the nice to have features offered by having the update done.
Again it was a very mixed bag of some owners having done FOC and some paying.
MG have made it perfectly clear that they do not regard this as a warranty claim and therefore will not reimburse the dealer for any workshop time spent applying this update.
Therefore the dealer two options here :-
One request payment from the customer for their workshop time.
Two they absorb the costs directly themselves.
It’s as plain and simple as that really.
We can go over and over the subject of who SHOULD pay until we are blue in the face TBH but it is, what it is !.
Very bluntly put, it’s “Pay Up or Shut Up” policy unfortunately.
