Hacker News Reader

Comment by albertgoeswoof | Hacker News Reader

I am so confused by government policy here in the UK. Right now I'm looking at a 5 year old used Diesel car with £0 road tax and 70+ MPG for about 10k GBP.

My current Petrol engine costs £130/annum road tax, and only gets 30-40 MPG, I can also buy petrol cars with road tax of £240-500/annum (based on emissions)

But if I buy the Diesel, it could be banned or worthless in a few years, because of these types of policies. So what is the government telling me to purchase?

I can't buy an electric car because I only have on street parking so there's nowhere to charge it, and decent electric cars aren't really available at the 10k mark yet.

View on HN

I could be wrong, but I would guess that your quandary isn't to do with the policy as such, but the way it's been gamed by car manufacturers. That diesel would likely have a much higher road tax if its actual emissions were taken in to account, and not just the lab-based ones.

Get a petrol car pay the tax would be my recommendation. Depends on what you need too. My 5-year-old petrol Fiesta was <£10k and is £0 road tax.

> That diesel would likely have a much higher road tax if its actual emissions were taken in to account, and not just the lab-based ones.

Is NOx a consideration for road taxes? If not, that's the issue. Diesels do emit less CO2 than gasoline and AFAIK, no auto companies were "cheating" CO2 emissions, just NOx.

Good point, I was wrong. The road tax policy should be updated to take NOx levels in to account. The recommendation remains :)

Vehicle Excise Duty doesn’t (generally) change retroactively, so 5 years ago they were telling whoever bought that diesel car to buy diesel.

The bands are now (since April 2017) flat regardless of emissions for petrol and diesel [1], so the encouragement is to buy either an electric car or a petrol/diesel car (as you prefer) with a new price less than £40k (or more than 5 years old).

The only part that changes with emissions now is the fee at registration, which is factored into the purchase price (for a new car) or already paid (for a used car).

1: https://www.gov.uk/vehicle-tax-rate-tables

> So what is the government telling me to purchase?

At least here in Germany, the message is clear: everything is fine, as long as the replacement interval is as short as the industry needs it to be. If the carmaker lobby could get away with it, they would make the government outlaw all cars already sold biannually.

(Except for vintage cars, which are sacred temples of brand heritage)

I seriously hope you do the right thing and do NOT buy diesel.

It would be incredibly irresponsible now that the dangers of NoX are known.

FYI, I live in London and am seriously affected by NoX, I’ve had bronchitis several times in the past few years.

London exceeded annual NoX limits within just a few weeks of the new year.

Luckily the tide is turning, public opinion is increasingly growing against diesel, and the govt is finally enacting extra diesel fees and considering bans.

Government policy is to not retroactively change tax bands but to control vehicle use through other means, eg emissions zones.

I’m sure you can work out the morally correct action based on the types of areas you drive through. You don’t really need the government to make this decision for you.

Right, but what happens when I take the morally correct action and suddenly have a worthless car?

Ignoring the question of whether there's even a morally correct action here, why not keep the worthless car you already have instead of replacing it with a newer one? That £10,000 will pay for a lot of petrol, car tax and repairs.

As someone's who's tried that, depending on how old the car is, that 10k can be burned through rather quickly. And then there's next year's maintenance to worry about.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com