Used diesel car values down 6%

Wolfetone

The Governments/environmentalists persecution of diesel car ownership continues and is now beginning to bite.

I am outraged that the Government only a few years ago, was encouraging me to buy a diesel but now is planning its persecution strategy. Rumours of increased taxes etc are concerning me as I drive between 35k and 40k miles per year for my job and an increase would severely alter my costings.

The other area of outrage is the way that the motor trade has jumped on the bandwagon with their cynical and opportunistic 'diesel scrappage schemes'. The money they offer is basically a part exchange value as they don't actually add an extra 'scrappage bonus' to what they would normally offer as a p/x.

What's the consensus? 

Fretwired

I agree. My BMW is three years old and has crashed in value - and its one of the 'cleaner' diesels. I get the rage about diesels in a city like London where the traffic is stationary most of the time so the pollution is concentrated, but my car is great on a long motorway journey. The government should clarify which diesels are dirty and get rid of them in cities - old trucks, vans, taxis and buses would be a good place to start. But as usual the environmentalists like to demonise a section of society. A shame as clean diesel is here ..

http://www.dieselforum.org/about-clean-diesel/what-is-clean-diesel

ICBM

I know this won't be popular with diesel owners, but I agree with the changes. The fault was that of the previous government artificially skewing the market towards diesel - it's wrong to blame this one for trying to fix their mistake. You can't go on doing the wrong thing just because it's what's been done before.

Look on the bright side - you've had several years of lower car tax, and you're still paying much less for the fuel compared to petrol than you would be if it was taxed correctly for environmental impact - it should be 16% more expensive per litre to reflect the carbon content, but it's actually around the same price.

I agree about the cynicism in the motor trade just using it as an excuse to sell more new cars though. It's still better from an environmental point of view to keep running your old diesel than scrap it and build a new petrol car to replace it, just as it was when it was made out to be better to scrap old petrol cars and replace them with diesels.

guitarfishbay

The same is bound to happen to petrol within our lifetimes, possibly within the life cycles of any new petrol cars bought now as a result of this diesel scandal.

What is unfortunate is that alternates aren't really ready yet to  replace diesel/petrol... if this whole thing had happened 5 years from now it'd probably be a lot easier for most people to switch over to electric.  Right now, the range on the affordable cars just isn't good enough for a lot of people, and the infrastructure isn't there either.  Not to mention you need a driveway to get maximum practicality out of the setup...  If you do under the max range each day and can charge at night then great.  If you can't then they're not a good choice.

The whole motor industry is going to change massively over the next couple of decades anyway, more so than it has in the previous few, IMO.  Service/MOT style garages and professional driving are going to take hits with electric vehicles and potentially driverless cars.

Wolfetone

Fretwired said:

old trucks, vans, taxis and buses would be a good place to start. 

Exactly. If the Government are that concerned, why not insist that ALL commercial  transport be something other than diesel? 

Being a bit of a cynic, have we considered the effect that everyone driving petrol vehicles will have on the Government coffers? It will increase the revenue from fuel duty by about 20%.

Wolfetone

ICBM said:

I know this won't be popular with diesel owners, but I agree with the changes. The fault was that of the previous government artificially skewing the market towards diesel - it's wrong to blame this one for trying to fix their mistake. You can't go on doing the wrong thing just because it's what's been done before.

Look on the bright side - you've had several years of lower car tax, and you're still paying much less for the fuel compared to petrol than you would be if it was taxed correctly for environmental impact - it should be 16% more expensive per litre to reflect the carbon content, but it's actually around the same price.

I agree about the cynicism in the motor trade just using it as an excuse to sell more new cars though. It's still better from an environmental point of view to keep running your old diesel than scrap it and build a new petrol car to replace it, just as it was when it was made out to be better to scrap old petrol cars and replace them with diesels.

I can understand your point on the Government trying to right a wrong but I think that it should be done in an organic way and not accelerated in a manner that causes pain.

Let the diesels die a natural death so people are able to change in a natural time scale 

TTony

guitarfishbay said:

The same is bound to happen to petrol within our lifetimes, possibly within the life cycles of any new petrol cars bought now as a result of this diesel scandal.

Given the announcements in France, the UK and China (and those are just the ones that I've noticed), I'd say that you're absolutely correct.

This isn't about replacing diesels with petrols - the move will be from diesels (first) to hybrids / full electrics.  Once that direction of travel (!) is established, the acceptability of hybrids/electrics becomes more widespread.  The next move is that  people don't stop buying petrol cars so much as just assume that they'll be buying a hybrid / electric because that's just "what you buy" (and also, they've got better as the increasing market size justifies the R&D investment needed to make them better).

Yup, there are plenty of dirty diesels, mainly powering vehicles that have been designed and built to a price (vans, buses, taxis), using relatively old and inefficient diesel technology.  Where those are predominantly used in towns and cities, you get the double whammy of lots of inefficient vehicles all in one place, and air quality takes a big hit.  There are also plenty of incredibly efficient (and relatively clean) diesel engines - and I'm planning on keeping mine.

ThorpyFX

ICBM said:

I know this won't be popular with diesel owners, but I agree with the changes. The fault was that of the previous government artificially skewing the market towards diesel - it's wrong to blame this one for trying to fix their mistake. You can't go on doing the wrong thing just because it's what's been done before.

The issue i have here is that not everyone is an expert in organic chemistry. The government could have/should have employed experts in this field to generate a policy on diesel vehicles. If they had, they wouldn't have pushed the technology so much.

When I did my degree in 1999-2001 I did a minor thesis on diesel particulate matter, it was widely understood then about the risk of particulate matter <PM10's and NOx. so If I could study this, why did the government push the tech?

The government aren't trying to fix their mistake here, they are going to use it as a method to extract more cash from ordinary vehicle owners, and that sucks. Especially when you consider that most of the actual harm in cities is done by Buses, Trucks, Taxis and Vans.... not your everyday users. These offenders are business users and any tax leveraged against them will be offset by the VAT they pay back. In other words they wont have to pay.

However Joe civvi cant leverage his fuel against VAT and consequently he becomes a cash cow for the government.

The answer is that they should accept the mistake, incentivise hybrids or electric vehicles to gradually move people away from diesels, They should then tax brand new (offending) vehicles but this should be a tax on the manufacturers not the consumers, thereby making the vehicles less attractive to make. Or if the manufacturers try and pass that cost onto consumers then the vehicles will become too expensive and less attractive thus killing off demand.

punitively taxing the average road user for owning a vehicle that they bought with the best of intentions is sloppy politics and a bloody disgrace.

Evilmags

Prmooting Diesel was the first disgrace. Again a simple case if taxpayers and drivers paying for bad decisions. 

Jalapeno

Wolfetone said:

Fretwired said:

old trucks, vans, taxis and buses would be a good place to start. 

Exactly. If the Government are that concerned, why not insist that ALL commercial  transport be something other than diesel? 

All new London Taxis have to be all-electric by 2020, they've also introduced a 15 year limit, so they'll start going soon.

Fretwired

Jalapeno said:

Wolfetone said:

Fretwired said:

old trucks, vans, taxis and buses would be a good place to start. 

Exactly. If the Government are that concerned, why not insist that ALL commercial  transport be something other than diesel? 

All new London Taxis have to be all-electric by 2020, they've also introduced a 15 year limit, so they'll start going soon.

Subject to there being sufficient charging points - and that's the problem in a City like London. It's all fine to say 'go electric' but the UK doesn't have the generation capacity nor the infrastructure to realistically deal with this in a city the size of London.

A more radical view from environmentalists would be to ban car ownership - improve public transport and perhaps make it free and allow people to 'rent' a car when they need it. I think car ownership will eventually be a thing of the past.

Drew_TNBD

Car ownership will only be a thing of the past once ANTIFA takes over and completely decimates the population of any free market thinkers, capitalists, and freedom lovers.

Enjoy your dystopia!

ESBlonde

Volve have already announced they are only going to make hybrid cars in the near future. Now that may simply be autostart in trafic on a diesel engine but they and others cleary think the ICE is not the future and the success of Mr Musk shows that alternate propulsion and further electronic control will be the norm in our lifetime, probably within a decade.

TTony

Fretwired said:
 I think car ownership will eventually be a thing of the past.

I can see that happening.

It's a fairly logical extension of the adoption of PCP (etc) deals, wherein you have use of a car when you need it, rather than for a pre-booked 3-year period.

It's also a logical extension of the introduction of self-driving vehicles which diminishes (and ultimately removes) the whole driving "experience" to replace it with a travelling "experience".  If you're only travelling in it, rather than driving it, it starts to look more like a taxi or single occupancy bus/train, and not many people want to own their own train to get to work in.

Also driverless truck convoys are a small step away from driverless car convoys (aka a road train) ...

To be fair, the car (as we recognise them today) market has had a good run - it'll probably be >200 years from birth to death - and there aren't many consumer goods markets that have lasted that long.  Particularly markets that are based on technology that is close to 150 years old ...

ICBM

ThorpyFX said:

punitively taxing the average road user for owning a vehicle that they bought with the best of intentions is sloppy politics and a bloody disgrace.

I disagree that there's anything punitive in removing an artificial subsidy they shouldn't have had in the first place. Punitive would be putting an extra tax on which is higher than the equivalent petrol car tax.

Diesel fuel is *still* heavily subsidised relative to petrol. If it was taxed correctly to reflect its carbon content and environmental cost it would be 16% more expensive, ie about £1.40 a litre compared to petrol at about £1.20 a litre. Until it is - or actually higher - I really don't think diesel owners have any right to complain.

Why should petrol or electric buyers be given incentives instead? That just compounds the problem by introducing another artificial distortion. The tax system needs to be based purely on the energy/carbon content, without artificially distorting it - that way drivers who need to do long distances will still want diesels because they are genuinely more efficient like that even at a higher fuel cost, and drivers who need to use cars mostly in towns won't because they aren't for that sort of use.

Yes, it's unfortunate for some people that they bought into the government's bribe and now they will have to pay a bit more, or change their car when they might not want to. How about those of use who now can't afford to buy a car because the models we want with petrol engines are either virtually unavailable and/or too expensive - should we be given hand-outs, or compensated for the years we spent paying more tax? No, of course not. So why should diesel owners continue to pay too little?

m_c

When diesels were first encouraged by the government, the main target was Co2 due to the perceived global warming issue. The human health aspect was never really the UK government's priority, but it was assumed if emissions overall were targeted, then air quality would improve, and the EU Euro emission levels would cover that part of it. The UK government weren't really alone in that thinking, as diesels were far more plentiful on the continent than here.

I had a good chat with my neighbour about it, who's a highly regarded professor in environmental/air pollution and spent his career researching the 'latest worry' (his words!) for the government, and even he said new policy was never perfect, as nobody could really predict the full repercussions. New policies were usually introduced to address the current concern, as that's typically what the research covered. Nobody wanted to introduce a policy on speculation/inconclusive evidence.

As for those mentioning commercial vehicles, the problem is diesel is still the best option. Commercial operators are incentivised to run lower emission vehicles (newer vehicles get lower VED), but a lorry is typically expected to have a 10-20 year lifespan, so somebody somewhere will be running older lorries.

Hybrid vehicles have been tried, but the technology just isn't good enough. It can work on lorries doing stop start work, but anything long distance it's just extra weight for little benefit, with reduced reliability and costs.
Even Lothian Buses are converting their hybrid fleet back to standard diesels, as they're not reliable. The rumoured figures are they were averaging 10% of the fleet broken down due to faults with the hybrid system. Now that's a council owned company, where profit isn't a top priority, so what hope is there for any other major bus operator to run such a fleet commercially?

crunchman

The trucks thing is a bit of a red herring:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/jan/06/diesel-cars-are-10-times-more-toxic-than-trucks-and-buses-data-shows

Like it or not, diesel cars are a major problem.  Even the best diesels give off more particulates and NO2 than petrol.  The Euro 6 NOx limit for diesels is 33% higher than the limit for petrols (even if it's being met).  What may be even worse is that the particulates from modern diesels are much smaller and get into the bloodstream in the lungs:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2017/04/26/toxic-diesel-particles-penetrate-right-heart-scientists-warn/

At least the black smoke belched out by older diesels wouldn't penetrate into the body.

Even when they are meeting the limits, diesels can give off more NO2 than petrols, but the majority on the road don't actually meet the limits:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2017/05/15/diesel-cars-pump-50-per-cent-toxic-emissions-should-major-report/

As @guitarfishbay said, battery powered and fuel cell cars aren't there yet.  In the short term petrol is less bad than diesel for the vast majority of cars and policy needs to reflect that.

I agree that it would be unfair to excessively penalise those who have bought diesels in good faith in the past, but policy on new cars needs to change.  I'd estimate that around a third of the 17 plate cars I see on my commute to work in London are diesel.  That is plain wrong given what we now know.

You could put a £75 per year pollution surcharge on the road tax of newly registered diesels.  For those like @Wolfetone who are driving 40k miles per year, that would be negligible in the grand scheme of things, but it would massively slow down the sales of new diesels.

I would also combine that with a 1p rise in duty on diesel at the pump.  That would be largely symbolic, but it would reinforce the message.  Diesel was £1.17 last week when I was in a garage.  In Jan 2012 it was £1.48 so a 1p rise wouldn't cripple anyone.

The problem is that our useless government has said that they will phase them out by 2040 (when air quality should be a lot better anyway) and has done nothing at all to fix things now.

Wolfetone

Wolfetone said:

The Governments/environmentalists persecution of diesel car ownership continues and is now beginning to bite.

I am outraged that the Government only a few years ago, was encouraging me to buy a diesel but now is planning its persecution strategy. Rumours of increased taxes etc are concerning me as I drive between 35k and 40k miles per year for my job and an increase would severely alter my costings.

The other area of outrage is the way that the motor trade has jumped on the bandwagon with their cynical and opportunistic 'diesel scrappage schemes'. The money they offer is basically a part exchange value as they don't actually add an extra 'scrappage bonus' to what they would normally offer as a p/x.

What's the consensus? 

Further to this, does anyone know if the cars put in under the deal are actually scrapped?

iseverynamegone

Estimate for part ex on the wife's Sorrento 3 months ago was £12.5k. Now it's £9.8k. 

6% I wish. 

guitarfishbay

Haven't the new number plates come out in the past 3 months?  That'll also be a factor.

ICBM

Wolfetone said:

Further to this, does anyone know if the cars put in under the deal are actually scrapped?

There would be a massive scandal brewing if it could be proved that they weren't. I think it's unlikely though, because from the car industry's point of view it's better to take as many older low-value cars out of circulation as possible, even without a government scheme. Reducing the stock of cheap second-hand cars pushes up prices overall and makes newer second-hand or brand new cars with finance schemes more attractive to buyers, and that's where the big money is.