It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Subscribe to our Patreon, and get image uploads with no ads on the site!
Base theme by DesignModo & ported to Powered by Vanilla by Chris Ireland, modified by the "theFB" team.
Comments
So, what happened then?
This is why I have always bought petrol.
Before Eco-politics became popular, no politician wanted to go anywhere near this sort of stuff but now it's everywhere. You can throw recycling on that same pile, along with all the other energy / environmental / transport strategies.
Exactly, which is why I think it's fairer to do it by taxing diesel at least at the correct rate to reflect its carbon content. But they don't seem to like that idea so they're doing it by a more complicated and less effective means. I'm actually surprised that the VED difference makes that much difference to most people anyway, it's a very small part of your annual transport cost. It didn't make me think about getting a diesel, and it wouldn't have done even if diesels paid no VED at all… I'm not sure how much the financial difference would have needed to be, there would presumably have been some point at which I wouldn't have been able to justify resisting it.
But essentially diesel owners have been unfairly subsidised for the last fifteen years compared to petrol owners - and are still being, on the fuel tax - so I'm sorry if I don't have much sympathy now that costs are going to have to go up slightly. Go and find Gordon Brown and complain to him .
"Take these three items, some WD-40, a vise grip, and a roll of duct tape. Any man worth his salt can fix almost any problem with this stuff alone." - Walt Kowalski
"Only two things are infinite - the universe, and human stupidity. And I'm not sure about the universe." - Albert Einstein
Everyday we spend money on things we enjoy. Another £100 or another £200 on something that I enjoy getting into is worth every penny. Not to mention it costs like £80 to fill up every 400 miles or so and that happens like every other week for me so in the grand scheme of things, when you divide that £100 or £200 over the course of the year, it's not something that would impact the bottomline.*
disclaimer - people who don't like driving and people who £100 means the difference between having a roof or not need not reply.
I pay £290 or so for VED, last car was £215, I didn't even think about how much the VED was when buying the car because given the choice say....pay £300 to drive a turbo petrol or keep £280 to drive a diesel?
Errrrrrrrrrrrr that's a no brainer surely.
Why the bitterness over diesel, @ICBM? Genuine question. If petrol cars were the cheaper of the two, I'd use them. Neither of the two are great for environment.
Although, under the new rules, it seems most cars you or I might look at will be £140, so < £3 per week; as @RaymondLin suggested above, might not be such a big deal...
I wonder what impact the current rules are having on company cars, where fleet managers will be doing their damnedest to keep costs down?
I did choose intentionally to not take advantage of the subsidy, yes - that was my decision and I'm not asking you to pay me back the extra cost of petrol and VED I've spent over the last fifteen years driving a petrol car when I could have been driving a diesel. So don't ask me to agree that it's unfair if your VED or fuel price is going to go up, even if it's not your fault that they were too cheap.
I have always known that diesel is more pollutive than petrol - it doesn't take a genius to know that. What's less obvious is that although it is actually slightly more efficient than petrol, the raw fuel consumption figures - which is what a lot of people base this on - are misleading because a large part of that 'greater mpg' is simply down to the greater amount of carbon per gallon that diesel contains - about 16%, which is why diesel should automatically be that much more expensive. In fact, once you take that into account, for the least efficient types of driving - stop-start in town - diesel can work out *less* efficient than petrol, in some cars. Not only that, the type of pollution it produces is far more dangerous.
Given that Gordon Brown made an extremely stupid mistake in encouraging people to move to diesel, and what we now know (or more accurately, was known all along, although not in as much detail as we now have) about how pollutive it is, what are you proposing should be done about it, if you don't want road tax to go up and you don't want diesel prices to go up? We can't go back and fix Brown's mistake now, but we have to fix the problem it caused somehow.
"Take these three items, some WD-40, a vise grip, and a roll of duct tape. Any man worth his salt can fix almost any problem with this stuff alone." - Walt Kowalski
"Only two things are infinite - the universe, and human stupidity. And I'm not sure about the universe." - Albert Einstein
Haulage companies will struggle to keep paying to fill up their trucks while trying to stay competitive. The same goes for buses.
There aren't any good options to fix this mess, only bad ones and worse ones, but that doesn't mean we can throw up our hands and do nothing about it. We have to start somewhere - the evidence about how harmful diesel particulates are is only going to grow.
The simplest of all options would be just to ban the sale of new diesel cars, starting say in 2019 to give the manufacturers time to replace their existing models. But we don't like to do things like that in this country for some reason, we rely on market forces to persuade people to make 'informed' choices.
But unless we do something, drastic measures like that are going to become necessary anyway - already, several major cities are proposing outright diesel bans.
Although it hasn't been mentioned yet, it wouldn't surprise me if London is one of those before too long.
http://www.standard.co.uk/news/health/london-toxic-smog-alert-issued-for-next-three-days-in-public-health-emergency-a3443381.html
"Take these three items, some WD-40, a vise grip, and a roll of duct tape. Any man worth his salt can fix almost any problem with this stuff alone." - Walt Kowalski
"Only two things are infinite - the universe, and human stupidity. And I'm not sure about the universe." - Albert Einstein
Would be a huge hike in tax on a brand new vehicle but if you can afford £40k and up then it's probably not a deal breaker.
The manufacturers are also working - and have been for some time - on the issues with diesels, hence particulate filters and adblue etc.
I'd say a bit more nuance would be helpful; diesels that are mostly used for longer trips and mostly on the motorways and A-roads (and there are lots of them) aren't causing enormous damage. It's the diesel superminis and similar that trundle around town on short journeys with cold DPFs that are harming people.
I'd suggest that the way to get people over to hybrid and electric and so on is to bring in - on an announced timetable - fees and restrictions for in-town and in-city use based on which Euro regulations the car meets. That way people who drive in town will sell their cars to people who don't (the latter not being penalised) and buy something that meets the current advice (which, no doubt, will change if the government's coffers get low). That cleans up the towns and cities without punishing anyone. You could also offer scrapage on any non-DPF diesel that's traded against a hybrid or electric car, which would get the worst polluters off the roads.
You also need a shift from the manufacturers - we've discussed this before. There's just not a lot of petrol choice for some car types. I know my tastes aren't mainstream, but I don't think anyone came up with a small, AWD petrol estate with some ground clearance and a bit of go.
As I said, there are ways to go about encouraging change that don't punish people for doing what they were told to do.
I'm a bit in the same boat with car choice too - we have two cars which will both need replacing in the next few years, a MPV - which are very hard to find a good choice of in petrol now - and a small 4WD. The choice for the 4WD looks like either a Suzuki SX4 (don't know if that's big enough for you) or that Subaru (which looks nice, but I can't afford). Not sure what I'm going to do about the MPV, but I will not buy a diesel.
"Take these three items, some WD-40, a vise grip, and a roll of duct tape. Any man worth his salt can fix almost any problem with this stuff alone." - Walt Kowalski
"Only two things are infinite - the universe, and human stupidity. And I'm not sure about the universe." - Albert Einstein
I offered a simple way to get the diesels out of city centres without anyone being punished. It'd lead to diesels becoming less desirable in city centres, which would reduce the supply to the second hand market. You could also restrict sales of new diesels because there'd be enough coming through the market to sustain the short term needs of the used market.
It doesn't punish anyone for doing what they were encouraged to do, and it gets rid of diesels quickly in city centres and at a sensible rate elsewhere. What's not to like?
But as with all things related to cars, any increase in cost whatever for any reason is unfair .
"Take these three items, some WD-40, a vise grip, and a roll of duct tape. Any man worth his salt can fix almost any problem with this stuff alone." - Walt Kowalski
"Only two things are infinite - the universe, and human stupidity. And I'm not sure about the universe." - Albert Einstein