Car Tax rant

AdrianC

Cornucopia wrote: »

anything that brings us closer to the psychological 100mpg barrier is a step forward.

A purely UK figure, of course.

3l/100km (~94mpg) is the equivalent for virtually all of the rest of the world - and VW were selling "3l" versions of the Lupo and A2 a decade and a half ago.

Joe_Horner

Cornucopia wrote: »

For those people running older cars, the first low emission vehicles are now 10-year+ old cars on the second-hand market. You can buy a 2003 Citroen C3, for example, with £30 road tax and a price tag of c. £1500. (There may well be cheaper examples available with a bit of hunting).

Believe it or not, £1500 is still at least twice, possibly 3x, what a lot of people round here could even think about spending on a car, which they need in order to get to work each day at NMW.

£500 sheds don't fall into £30 tax brackets.


eta: as for new technology having far more impact than driving habits, don't believe it.

We currently run a '95 Pug 405 TD estate and a '93 BMW 525 TD auto. The BMW averages about 38mpg, mid 40s on a run, which isn't great but it is what it is. The Pug gives an overall average of a smidge under 45mpg, with mid - high 50s on a run.

Compare that with the brand new Colt 1.5 diesel we had before these. That was quoted at (iirc) 63mpg overall but, over 3 years of extremely careful monitoring, and without our driving styles changing it actually averaged 47.2mpg. In fact, if anything, we do more local trips now than when we had the Colt, which should favour the Colt's average.

So, on the pug my driving style gives around 7 - 8 mpg more than the maker claimed for it when it was new (it's now on 207k miles), which shows that my driving style is economic. Yet there's barely any difference between its 20 year old technology and the Colt's (now) 6 year old technology in real world situations, which suggests that the technology "improvements" made very little difference in reality despite the headline figures.

AdrianC

There are 3,900 cars on Autotrader currently for less than a grand, with tax in band E or below - a snidge over a tenner a month, the same price as <1550cc pre-2001 cars.

Sure, not many of those are in the £30-or-below bands, largely because 10-15yrs ago there were very few new cars available in those bands.

anotheruser

force_ten wrote: »

what do you call a few pence? to me that would be 2p per litre.

A few is 3/4.
2 is a couple... think couple of people.

AdrianC wrote: »

It's an encouragement to buy/drive more efficient vehicles. Drive an efficient vehicle badly, it still uses less fuel and emits less CO2 than driving an inefficient one in the same way.

I drive my vehicle as efficiently as possible but get charged the same rate as someone who rags theirs about like there's no tomorrow, so there's no incentive to drive efficiently at all.

If I could afford to purchase a brand new, low "nasties-in-the-air" car, I certainly would. Maybe the government should buy my car for £5000 and with that £5000, I'll buy a newer, more efficient version.
Oh wait, they already did that and look how that turned out!

Cornucopia

Joe_Horner wrote: »

Believe it or not, £1500 is still at least twice, possibly 3x, what a lot of people round here could even think about spending on a car, which they need in order to get to work each day at NMW.

£500 sheds don't fall into £30 tax brackets.

I appreciate that, but presumably it's only a matter of time before they do.

...

So, on the pug my driving style gives around 7 - 8 mpg more than the maker claimed for it when it was new (it's now on 207k miles), which shows that my driving style is economic. Yet there's barely any difference between its 20 year old technology and the Colt's (now) 6 year old technology in real world situations, which suggests that the technology "improvements" made very little difference in reality despite the headline figures.

That's PSA for you, excellent diesel engines.

In my experience, there's not a huge issue with this. A previous car was a Citroen C4 1.6 HDi 90bhp - so slightly underpowered to raise its mpg. I once drove that car from London-Bordeaux on a single tank of diesel, and from London-Edinburgh on half a tank. (The Edinburgh trip equates to 70+mpg, and the Bordeaux one 60+mpg - presumably the 130kph motorways are the explanation).

The nature of it is that these cars favour long trips - the engine needs to be hot, and the driving pace steady.

Cornucopia

anotheruser wrote: »

I drive my vehicle as efficiently as possible but get charged the same rate as someone who rags theirs about like there's no tomorrow, so there's no incentive to drive efficiently at all.

Except that you don't, and there is.

The person driving more efficiently uses less fuel, with all the existing taxes that entails.

Bigphil1474

I did some calculations a while back and fuel duty would have to go up by at least 15% to match the loss in road tax of an average car. Less for commercial vehicles doing high mileage (plus most don't pay VAT so that's 20% off). However, you would then have to factor in the car owners who do a few k miles a year who pay the same road tax as everyone else but pay more per mile than someone doing 10-15k miles a year. Could end up being 20-25% increase needed.


The big draw back to me is that the more petrol costs, the easier it seems for the Govt. to justify higher per pence annual increases on duty. Road Tax does go up, but seems to go up in more reasonable increments - not sure if it's indexed linked? When petrol gets back up to the 130p/litre or more levels, I wouldn't fancy a 15% increase to eliminate road tax - 150p/litre!! Apparently petrol is 2 (two) p/litre in Venezuela, but not sure the weather agrees with me. I do like the monthly direct debit option though.
To answer the original post, don't tax a car on the last day, or at the end of, the month - is it any more complicated than that?

AdrianC

Bigphil1474 wrote: »

Apparently petrol is 2 (two) p/litre in Venezuela

A barrel of oil is 160 litres.
At $60/barrel, that's 37.5c/litre just for the crude oil, before transportation, refining, marketing etc.

No, it's not quite that simple, but...

sirloyneofcowes

marlot wrote: »

If you part exchanged your old car, I'm not clear why you went to the hassle of SORNing it. Just trading it in would have been sufficient, and automatically triggered a refund of unused months.

The only way to beat the system would be to trade the old car in on the last day of the month, and collect the new one on the 1st.

Under the old system:
If the new car didn't have any tax on it when bought, you'd still be in the same position as you are now - having to buy a complete month, just for one day of use.

Hi Marlot, sorry only just got this. Phoned the DVLA because I wasn't sure how it worked.

How it was explained to me, by the really helpful guy, was that if you send the V5c back to them, and it gets to them a few days after the start of another month, you lose that months tax too (so you lose February AND March). So irrespective of whether you sell the car at the end of the month, the DVLA will only issue refunds upon receipt of the V5c. The only way to do it is to SORN the old car online before month end, as their computers will be updated straight away.

sirloyneofcowes

Hi Guest101, yes it does sound contradictory, however historical circumstances being what they were at the time I had received points on my licence.

And for the other comments, when buying the car I needed to leave early on the 1st March for a cross country trip (leaving at 8.30 in the morning), so picking it up the day after was not an option for me.