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Has zero road tax just jumped to £140?


martin68
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I just read on the hyper mile website that all cars of low emission apart from pure electric will now be charged starting at £140 per year for road tax. Is this true?

I recently baught Auris hybrid and got zero road tax, that was another factor that appealed to me, but now, correct me if I'm wrong, the goalposts have been moved even further away.

Pure electric cars are still too unaffordable for most of us, so for us folk with less cash to splash, we are once again clobbered with higher bills.

Where does Deisel fit into this road tax hike? My Peugeot 407 hi had a road tax bill of £ 160 ish, so by how much has this now increased? 

And my friends Mondeo Deisel only costs him £30 a year to tax, so by how much has his gone up?

I hope I'm wrong, but I don't like the fact that a zero tax car now suddenly jumps up to a whopping  £140. 

Is this true?

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Vehicles first registered on or after 1st April 2017 are subject to revised rates of vehicle excise duty (road tax).

In the first year of registration VED is based on CO2 emissions. The second and subsequent years will be £140 per year, and if the vehicle cost over £40K, an additional annual £310 fee will be payable. Alternative fuel cars get a £10 annual reduction from year 1. Zero emissions vehicles have a £0 VED rate.

Vehicles first registered before 1st April, currently continue on the previous CO2 based VED rates.

Your car will continue on the pre-April 2017 rates.

The government is considering changes to VED rates for diesel vehicles, and these may be announced in the Autumn.

See. http://www.theaa.com/driving-advice/driving-costs/car-tax#newrules2017 

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so basically my hybrid will still have zero road tax even in years to come when i plan to sell it on? If so that would be a good selling point too.

i'm glad the tax hike is not for pre 1st April 17 cars.

Extra mpg and zero tax is why i bought my hybrid in the first place.

Only £10 reduction for alterative fuel cars is very mean, they could have knocked 50% off at least being that we are trying to be green and save money.

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Just reading the link and notice that all new cars will be £140 regardless of their co2 emissions, so basically its a U turn back to the old taxing system of the 80's and 90's when everyone paid the same tax.

Why would they do this U turn, it will stop the green incentive and people will buy gas guzzling cars and still only pay £140? this makes no sense to me.

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Your car currently has £0 VED, but who knows what future governments may introduce as regards VED changes.

Not everyone will be paying £140 - those with cars which cost over £40K new will be paying an extra £310 per year (so £450 VED per year). As a fairly high proportion of these may be 'gas guzzlers', these owners are being hit the hardest. Then again if one can afford to run a vehicle costing over £40K, they may not notice the extra VED costs too much.

Reasoning behind the changes must include that government has to reduce NOx emissions, and the amount of tax they've been collecting via the VED system has been dropping due to the tax being based on CO2 emissions.

 

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Aren't you glad that you didn't buy a brand new car. :laugh:

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most cars on the road are cheap cars, under 40k new, so if you can afford a 40k+ car then you can obviously afford to run it too.

As for the under 40k cars, some emit less than 100 grams of co2 while some emit 256+ of co2, putting the first year aside, why does the under 100g co2 have to pay just as much as the over 256g, I see that in the first year the higher co2 has to pay a big ammount in the first year, but once the same car exchanges hands to a new owner after the first expensive year, then the new owner does not have to pay any higher road tax for a 256g+ car as they would for a under 100g car, this no longer puts a second hand car buyer off from buying a gas guzzler 

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They have realised that they stopped getting as much money, with people buying greener cars. Rest assured when we are all driving electric cars, will be all be paying road tax again.

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As I said earlier, VED revenue has been dropping due to more cars being sold which produce less CO2. Which is why the government have decided to claw back some of the lost revenue with the new scheme. There has also been talk of the government resurrecting a separate fund that some of the VED revenue will be paid into, which will be used to part finance road construction.

As regards pollution, C02 is only part of the problem - NOx especially from diesels and some direct injection petrol cars is now a major issue. When the previous CO2 based VED system was introduced, vehicle manufacturers had promised to reduce NOx emissions significantly - this never happened. 

So now we have the new VED system, which is not so reliant on CO2 ratings, and which generates more revenue for government. We will also have Clean Air Zones in five English cities by 2020, which will limit access to vehicles which produce high levels of NOx. London will also have an Ultra Low Emissions area which will favour low emissions vehicles and limit access to other vehicles. As I said earlier, the government is considering further measures against older diesels, which may produce low levels of CO2, but high levels of NOx.

It also seems increasingly unlikely that a scrappage scheme for older diesels will happen due to the cost.

So what we have, and are due to have, is here to stay.

 

 

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8 hours ago, Anthony Poli said:

They have realised that they stopped getting as much money, with people buying greener cars. Rest assured when we are all driving electric cars, will be all be paying road tax again.

Over my cold dead body we will be. The future is hydrogen, not electric. But I digress.

I do think though that 3 "teirs" of road tax isn't sustainable. You have two tax bands for pre-2001 cars, then you have CO2 dependent tax bands from 2001 to 2017, then this new version for anything after 2017. I can't see how they'll keep that going, and in order to "streamline" the process you could expect the older pre-2001 cars all be on the one tax band regardless of engine size, and the CO2 dependent tax bands either shrink so there's less of them or revert to the new post-2017 system.

It's interesting to note, however, that Singapore had a huge problem with air quality a few years ago. They had a lot of old diesel vehicles, and their government decided to replace those vehicles with cleaner ones. Not so much offer money towards a new vehicle if part exchanged, but more or less subsidise the purchase of a new vehicle. Since then their air quality has improved.

So it can be done, if people want it badly enough. But we're in the UK - we don't do things logically or for the greater good.

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Think with government looking at how to tackle older diesels, we may end up with a replacement system for pre April 2017 vehicles. Whether this does away with the CO2 based system, takes into account NOx emissions or is a combination of both, is anyone's guess. Whatever happens, I suspect that everyone will end up paying more.

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  • 2 weeks later...
On 5/23/2017 at 7:17 PM, martin68 said:

Just reading the link and notice that all new cars will be £140 regardless of their co2 emissions, so basically its a U turn back to the old taxing system of the 80's and 90's when everyone paid the same tax.

Why would they do this U turn, it will stop the green incentive and people will buy gas guzzling cars and still only pay £140? this makes no sense to me.

Exactly!!!! It can't be about the environment, can it?!

Diesel vehicles should pay an additional diesel charge, because of the fact they are so much more polluting (not just for NOx emissions, but generally they emit more noxious substances than petrol vehicles).

Making all vehicles essentially pay the same though (after the first year), destroys the economic arguments for buying environmentally friendly cars. They generally cost more to begin with, so it dis-incentivizes buying them. :(

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7 hours ago, YarisHybrid2016 said:

Diesel vehicles should pay an additional diesel charge, because of the fact they are so much more polluting (not just for NOx emissions, but generally they emit more noxious substances than petrol vehicles).

EU 6 don't.

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Some gasoline direct injection vehicles emit higher levels of NOx than some diesels. 

Some manufacturers are looking at gasoline particulate filters - eg. VW will be fitting GPF's on some petrol engines within a year.

Whether or not people move over to nil emission vehicles, the government will still need to raise money from the motorist, so any future VED system or replacement system will be either a combination to reduce pollution and raise money, or just raise money.

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It also depends on your point of view; I like to think the reductions in CO2 have been down to the uptake of diesel (Which alas has given us a different set of issues)

 

As there is no longer any incentive to get a low-CO2 car, that trend will slowly be reversed over the next few years.

One good side is hopefully this will also stop petrol manufacturers putting stupid devices on their cars like Lean Burn mode, which lowers CO2 but massively increases NOx, and EGR which lowers NOx but makes everything else worse, to try and get into the low CO2 tax brackets and just concentrate on make their cars more efficient.

And who knows, Diesels might make a comeback when we start to run out of oil and we have to start rationing it! (Assuming ICE engines haven't been completely banned by then in favour of nuclear-powered electrics by then... *still crossing his fingers for his own personal Mr Fusion*)



 

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IMHO they should just aim for maximizing fuel economy. None of it matters when there is no fuel left to burn.

Interesting reading regarding NOx emissions: http://www.carbuyer.co.uk/news/153072/petrol-outperfoms-diesel-in-new-real-world-emissions-index

Of the latest hybrids tested, both the Toyota Prius and Yaris, the Volkswagen Golf GTE and Porsche Cayenne S E-Hybrid all achieved the maximum ‘A’ rating.

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Okay I read the first line of that article and immediately feel this guy has not done enough research...

Repeat after me article writer: NOx is *NOT* nitrous oxide!!!

*ahem*

But NOx *should* never be a problem with petrol engines; It should only be a diesel problem.

It only became a problem with petrol engines because they were trying to have high powered engines with low CO2 output, and found you could fudge the CO2 rating by making them burn lean. I'm hoping with the change to flat tax, car manufacturers can stop trying such stupid workarounds and, as you say YH2016, just make the cars more fuel efficient.

There is *no* good reason to run a petrol engine lean (As in with more air than it can use to burn fuel) - In older engines this would be considered a fault! We already *know* the exact fuel-air mix ratio for optimal burn that will only produce CO2 and water, and this is the only ratio a petrol engine should ever use for maximum efficiency. The beauty of this is you just get loads of CO2 and water but very little else, and is why petrols going back to the dark ages never had high NOx.

With diesels, it was always a problem because diesels burn lean almost all the time, and at much higher temps than petrol (That high compression ratio means the air hits over 600°C vs petrol's maybe half of that, before ignition). There is no easy way round it; Even with Euro6 diesels, NOx emissions haven't really gone down, just been hidden through clever engine management and crap like EGRs.

The EGR was designed specifically to suffocate the engine, so there is less oxygen in the cylinder to bind with nitrogen in the cylinder, so it reduces NOx, but because diesel is sprayed in rather than mixed like in petrol, this also means it's harder for the diesel to burn properly so you get increases in CO, CO2, particulates, SOx and a reduction in fuel economy.

IMHO most of these problems have come about because of government knee-***** reactions, trying to legislate things in an 'eco' direction to win brownie points without looking at what the possible consequences are.



 

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I only glossed over it.

NOx is shorthand for NO, and NO_2. It's the latter we're really concerned about.

It's the same mistake as when people talk about "carbon", when they actually mean "carbon dioxide".

I never understood why they thought it was a good idea. You can't beat the chemistry of combustion!

Stochiometric ratio is the magic term that is missing in any of these discussions, but the politicians are too stupid to understand.

You probably wouldn't be surprised that I think this whole "climate change" discussion is nonsense, too. None of it makes any sense.

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The government of the day thought a VED system based on carbon dioxide emissions was a good idea because the vehicle manufacturers promised to tackle the NOx emissions - and the manufacturers didn't.

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Did they? That doesn't sound like something the government would do... heck, I didn't think NOx was even highlighted back then - It was CO2 that was the big headline 'problem' back then when I was a kid! (It was even a thing in science class; My solution was Grow More Trees :laugh:).

In fact, I thought the main producer of vehicular NOx was diesels back then - Petrols chucked out cartloads of CO2 but produced negligible NOx and SOx - but hardly anyone drove a diesel car back then because they were utter garbage! It was pretty much limited to busses, taxis and trucks from what I remember; Diesel cars were seen as smelly, slow and underperforming - not popular at all!

They only became more popular BECAUSE of the changes in VED, which encouraged development on them, the biggest breakthrough being the pairing of a turbo with them - something previously too expensive to have because of the difficulty in precision engineering and materials, but is now mass-produced and common place.

I only remember NOx (And SOx) being mentioned as an aside as a component of Acid Rain - Something you hardly hear anyone even talking about thee days; Practically nothing about its effect on health until more recently.


 

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"They only became more popular BECAUSE of the changes in VED, which encouraged development on them, the biggest breakthrough being the pairing of a turbo with them'

Diesels were gaining in popularity before the CO2 based VED system, which was introduced in 2001.

Cars such as the Golf Mk2 GTD, Peugeot 309 and 405, etc. Engines such as the VW 1.9 R4, and PSA XUD (used in the 205, 306, 405, 406, Rover 200/400, Citroen ZX, Xsara, Berlingo, Toyota Corolla, etc), both in normally aspirated and turbo forms.

The government department I worked for had nothing but diesels and turbo diesels as Crown vehicles throughout the 1990's. Diesels were the norm for most businesses.

Yes the CO2 VED system increased the popularity of diesels, but it wasn't the only reason behind their popularity.

 

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I remember BMW coming out with diesel versions of their cars in the early 1990s. The argument was they were better suited to long-distance driving vs. petrol.

The "slow" argument was only true in terms of acceleration. They could definitely move - they just needed more road to get there.

It wasn't long after they brought out the basic turbo version that they introduced intercoolers to further improve performance. They were more viable prior to direct injection/common rail technology reaching the masses.

I was looking recently through some old brochures for Peugeot 305 diesel cars - they kept talking about how much better fuel economy was and how environmentally friendly they were. :laugh:

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(Edit: Sorry, this goes increasingly off topic but I can't be ubikd to edit it now as I have just driven 120 miles at night and am tired but have insomnia... sooo apologies for the rambling!)

Businesses, yeah - My memories of that time were that diesels had a reputation for being 'repmobiles', but not at all popular with the general public...

Heck, when I finally decided to get rid of my first car (That dreadful Ford Fiesta... How can a car with a 1.3 petrol engine be so much worse than one with a 1.0?! Gah!!), I dismissed diesels out of hand initially; It was only much later when a friend was gushing about how awesome his was (Old Pumpe Düse Passat, was super comfy and had absolutely insane amounts of torque) that I started to even pay attention to their existence, and with the DVLA entering you into a prize draw for zero-tax TDI Seat Leons (or Ibizas) every year when you paid your car tax, plus VW heavily advertising their Bluemotion Polo as having £0 tax that it started to creep into my mind as a possibility.

I really wanted one of those Polos initially but realized I couldn't afford one for many years (In hindsight, lucked out there... drove one a decade later and realised it was actually a terrible car!:laugh: 3-pot made it really rattly at idle and the gearing was far too long)

Then after much increasingly frustrated searching I somehow ended up test-driving a Mk1 Yaris D4D and realized it was the perfect car! It was kinda weird as I'd never even heard of a Yaris before then as they were mostly unheard of (Not like now where you can't swing a dead fur hat without hitting one! :laugh:), but I feel so lucky to have discovered it when I did. Best normal car Toyota ever made IMHO :wub:

Even after all this time I still haven't gotten over how flexible the interior is, and I still haven't gotten over the novelty of having that much torque in such a small light car. It's so fun being able to drive everywhere but the steepest hills in 4th if you feel like it and not feel the engine labour at all! And it's so forgiving to drive; Many a time it's saved me from a stall where a petrol car would have just cut out.

It's been a double-edged sword 'tho because it's made finding a car to move to nearly impossible... I really hate driving a car with dials now as I can't keep switching between the road and the speedo as much as I do in my car without getting eye strain; It also takes me longer to refocus and lock onto the tiny needle than it does to glance at the big collimated digital speedo (Which is like magic; You don't have to refocus your eyes to look at it!).

Then there is the lack of storage; I really hate Toyota for removing all the storage binnacles in the Mk3! It has like, a single glove box! The Mk1 has two glove boxes, three binnacles, a coin tray, an ash tray and a hidden under-tray that was great for hiding my laptop securely. The Mk3 is so much bigger than the Mk1 but it's got so much wasted space inside! Why Toyota? Whyyy?? The dash is already an entire foot deeper than the Mk1's, surely you could have found some space for storage!?

And I love that the Mk1 is only a tiny big bigger than the Aygo but has so much more storage flexibility - Big friends in the car? Slide the rear seats back; Lots of shopping? Slide it forward. Got an inconveniently tall object? Wind back the sunroof. No need to compromise on having no boot space or cutting your friends legs off, but still keeping the car well under 4m long for easy parking - Most new cars in the same class either sacrifice boot space, your passenger's legs, or are over 4m long, at which point you may as well be looking at something in the Auris/Corolla/Golf size/class!

It really sucks that I'll pprobably have to get rid of it when the force through this ULEZ extension in London... :crybaby:

Man... if only I could nick the running gear out of that Yaris Hybrid-R and retro fit it into my Mk1... that would let me keep it and also make it the best car *ever*... :naughty:

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  • 2 weeks later...

EDIT: wondered what Hybrid-R was, but Google answered the question! :smile:

Umm - cut the front-end off and retro-fit the whole of the Hybrid-R front-end? :tongue:

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Yeah, it's a pretty bananas hybrid concept car Toyota was putting about a while back... It was a lot 'dumber' than the HSD in that it was a more conventional hybrid - ICE drives front wheels, leccy motors drive back.

I liked the fact it had hi-tech fancy things like torque-vectoring to maximise grip; It even could drive the left or right electric motor harder in a turn to add extra steering force round a corner! The only other car I'm aware of that has positive torque-vectoring like this is that insane Merc SLS!



 

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