New road tax rules...

Moe_Zambeek

we'll be seeing local authorities banning diesels before central government does. Don't expect anyone to spend money on sophisticated systems to charge fees based on the individual vehicle and its EU compliance either.

As a two-wheeler we've known diesel was the fuel of the devil for decades, both in terms of belching out black pollutants and in terms of generating slicks of grip-reducers on the road. It'l be a godsend to see it priced off the roads

ThePrettyDamned

It seems like a really stupid solution to the problem. That probably won't solve the problem in any quick time. 

Hopefully cities will start banning the use of diesel vehicles for anything other than the sort of work it's good for - pulling heavy loads and long distance travel. 

crunchman

Educating the public would be a good start.  For most drivers, diesels are already a false economy.

For drivers who don't do a lot of miles, diesel is already actually more expensive.  It's just that people look at the headline mpg figure and don't actually do the maths about what it actually means.  If you do 10,000 miles per year in a petrol at 40mpg you are going to spend around £1350 per year on fuel.  If you look at Ford's official price list, a base model petrol Focus is £13,529 while  the cheapest diesel is £16,262.  You need to do a lot of miles to make up that difference.  Even if you save 20% of the fuel cost by buying a diesel it's still going to take around 10 years to make up the difference in price.

Add in potential problems with clogged diesel particulate filters, and the costs that will add and it really isn't worth getting a diesel for most drivers.  It's just that they haven't figured it out.

Currently, someone who buys a new diesel will get some of the extra they pay back when they sell the car on especially as someone buying a second hand car will prefer the one with the lower tax.  The new tax changes will hit resale value on new diesels so it makes the economics of diesel even worse going forwards.

Having said that, you do need to do more than that.  I've said this in other threads, but I would put an immediate rise of 1p a litre on duty on diesel.  It would be largely symbolic, and prices would still be lower than they were a few years ago, but it would send a message.  It would also help make older diesels marginally less economical to run compared with newer petrols and might help get a few off the road.

There are other things that can be done.  Some London authorities are now charging more for residents parking permits for diesels which is probably a good way forwards.  At the moment it's only around £20 per year, and is largely symbolic, but it will probably help.

The other problem that needs to be addressed is delivery trucks.  This is from an article on the London Evening Standard website I read this morning:

Gridlock has been blamed on the increase in delivery vans and minicabs, rather than private car use, which has been falling.

There is no reason that deliveries in cities can't be made with electric vehicles.  If you charged £25 a day for a courier company to drive a diesel 3.5 tonne van in a city, they would soon switch to electric, or at the very least, route their deliveries more efficiently.

You also need to look at more click and collect type services.  The same Standard article suggests that TFL should look at click and collect services at their stations so that people could pick up parcels on their way home from work.

Bidley

ICBM said:

Bidley said:

VED isn't the only incentive for driving a diesel. 9 times out of 10 it's more economical, fuel-wise. My VED is only £20 a year cheaper, but it's £50 a month cheaper to fuel.

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.

No bitterness - just pointing out that those who have had the benefit of an unjustified subsidy - which I admit was not their doing, but which they chose to take advantage of - on top of another unjustified subsidy in the fuel tax, are now moaning that they're being unfairly penalised, which in my opinion is untrue. You are not even paying a fair price for the fuel, compared to petrol.

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.

I think you need to take your own advice and blame Gordon Brown

ThorpyFX

EricTheWeary said:

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. 

possibly.... but thats a tax of envy rather than a fair tax. if you buying a car/van thats £40k you already pay £6700 in VAT which is a lot more than someone buying a £10000 car and so on top of that the answer is to tax proportionally more because you can afford it anyway?

Its the "middle classes" being targeted again because they are a soft target.

One thing that isn't mentioned here is that diesel Fuel is actually a LOT more efficient to make than Petrol. So the usage in cars only tells half the story. Petrol whilst lacking as much NOx particulates emits more CO, CO2, Benzene and other aromatics as well as being less efficient on the whole.

The correct answer is electric cars and Hydrogen fuel cells, but whilst most of the world econpmyis oil based, the elites will not allow the switch easily.

Sporky

crunchman said:

If you look at Ford's official price list, a base model petrol Focus is £13,529 while  the cheapest diesel is £16,262.

The cheapest diesel is £15,554, and that's not a straight comparison as the diesel is more powerful and better specced.

When you look at equivalent models the difference is about £6-800 across the board, which you'll get back when you sell it (unless you keep it ages at which point the difference per year is vanishingly small).

I agree completely that a lot of people end up with diesel when it's perhaps not the most economical choice for them, and that that results in more/worse pollution in towns and cities, but let's be honest about the numbers.

axisus

I've just got a 2nd hand diesel car, my car died and a friend was selling. My tax has gone down from £210 a year to £30 and it does way more miles to the gallon. I agree that neither fuel is exactly great for the environment, so diesel it is for me for as long as this car lasts.

crunchman

Sporky said:

crunchman said:

If you look at Ford's official price list, a base model petrol Focus is £13,529 while  the cheapest diesel is £16,262.

The cheapest diesel is £15,554, and that's not a straight comparison as the diesel is more powerful and better specced.

When you look at equivalent models the difference is about £6-800 across the board, which you'll get back when you sell it (unless you keep it ages at which point the difference per year is vanishingly small).

I agree completely that a lot of people end up with diesel when it's perhaps not the most economical choice for them, and that that results in more/worse pollution in towns and cities, but let's be honest about the numbers.

I looked at the official Ford Price list online.  There were a lot of models, and I may have missed one, but I wasn't trying to be dishonest.  From what I saw the difference is significantly more than £6 - 800.   Whatever else it has, the cheapest diesel Focus is still £2k more than the cheapest petrol.

£2k plus difference seems to be common.  This article quotes £2400 more for a diesel Fiat 500 compared with a petrol.
http://www.whatcar.com/advice/buying/do-i-choose-petrol-or-diesel/

As an example, the Fiat 500 diesel does nearly 14mpg more than its 1.2 petrol sister, but its purchase price is £2400 higher. On economy alone, owners would need to cover more than 130,000 miles in the diesel before the fuel economy/purchase price equation levels out. Once servicing costs are factored in, the petrol car builds its advantage, ending up more than £900 cheaper to run over three years or 36,000 miles.

With average mileage for car drivers now only around 8,000 miles per year, why are most new cars diesel?  People are stupid.

Sporky

crunchman said:

I looked at the official Ford Price list online.  There were a lot of models, and I may have missed one, but I wasn't trying to be dishonest.  From what I saw the difference is significantly more than £6 - 800.   Whatever else it has, the cheapest diesel Focus is still £2k more than the cheapest petrol.

I had the price list open in front of me when I was typing. Essentially what you're saying is that lower spec cars are cheaper than higher spec cars (the Fiat example you give is the two models at opposite ends of the range!), and trying to make that a "petrol is cheaper than diesel" argument by extension. This is faulty logic.

Some counter-examples: the Porsche Cayenne is significantly cheaper as a diesel - around £11,000. The Jaguar F-Pace is cheaper as a diesel - £35k vs £52k. The Audi A8 is £20k cheaper as a diesel.

And again you've ignored the resale value which is higher for diesels - that has a serious effect on the overall cost of ownership. Mostly people don't scrap their cars when they buy new ones - they sell them.

crunchman said:

With average mileage for car drivers now only around 8,000 miles per year, why are most new cars diesel?  People are stupid.

Most new cars are not diesel. In 2015 it was 48.4%. Again, if we're going to use figures can we use correct ones - particularly if you're going to call people stupid based on them.

strtdv

It's probably going to be the EU rather than the UK government which kills off the diesel, as each new set of Euro emissions rules make it progressively harder for diesels to meet them. The newest way is urea injection, which I believe adds about 1000 euro to the cost of a new car.
Alternatively you could just do what the USA does and make petrol so cheap that no-one cares about mpg and the market for diesel disappears overnight.


I see both sides. As a driver, I like diesels, they're efficient, they're torquey, and in my experience I've had more go wrong with petrol cars than diesel cars.
However as a cyclist I find diesel fumes definitely make my exercise induced asthma worse, and I appreciate concerns about high levels of NOx in cities.

Petrol has its own drawbacks though, as they emit more CO2, and also measurable amounts of platinum, which a lot of people are allergic to.

Electric or Hydrogen is probably the future, but until the technology comes on a bit I'm sticking with my diesel.

blobb

use your cars less.

"Oh, but I can't do that because work is so far from home? "

Start there.......

ICBM

Bidley said:

I think you need to take your own advice and blame Gordon Brown

I already did, more than once!  

It very much is his fault - probably not his alone since I'm sure he had advice, but at the end of the day it came down to him signing off on it.

That still doesn't mean it's wrong to undo the mistake he made now.

robgilmo

There are two sides to the story of diesels being more pollutant, in a lot of cases they arnt.

Also, those who paid little tax for a diesel vehicle, now you pay tax like the rest of us, don't cry about it.


I run veg oil in my Landy, Its 32 years old, I still have to pay over 230 quid a year to tax it. 

ICBM

robgilmo said:

I run veg oil in my Landy, Its 32 years old, I still have to pay over 230 quid a year to tax it. 

Interestingly, Rudolf Diesel's original engine was designed to run on vegetable oil (peanut oil I think) and heavy mineral oil was substituted later.

Genuine question - what are the particulates like when burning vegetable oil... the same as with mineral, or not? And the NOx? Obviously the carbon dioxide doesn't matter since the same amount was extracted from the atmosphere when the crops were grown.

robgilmo

No Idea, It runs cleaner, it gets more MPG, it makes the engine run smoother, more power, runs slightly cooler, no problem with the MOT, smells like a chip shop.
It doesn't burn fossil fuels which is a good thing, but If I'm honest its the MPG and smoother running along with the power increase that makes me run it.


There is lots on Google regarding emissions, This came up in a brief search.

http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/2012/05/diesel-vs-biodiesel-vs-vegetable-oil/index.htm

Keep in mind my old Landy is old tech, its an indirect injection , no Egr or any emissions control for that matter, apart from the usual crank case vent back to induction, but its still on the road after 31 years and should last at least another 31 years so if what they say is true that scrapping a car causes the most pollution in a vehicles life then it cant be a bad thing, can it?  

Sporky

robgilmo said:

if what they say is true that scrapping a car causes the most pollution in a vehicles life then it cant be a bad thing, can it?  

Opinion seems to be divided on that one.

maltingsaudio

Thought process when buying a car:

Does it look cool
Colour
Can I get my stuff in it
Does it need fixing
Will it need fixing
Make
MPG
Tax
Price

All the rest doesn't come into it, bit like buying a guitar