Increase fuel duty and VED for diesel cars, says think tank

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• Mark Williams - 14/08/2019 11:44

  Wouldn't it be excellent for air quality if PMs could be cut by 95% and commuters able to get vehicles which do 200mpg? Well, this exists in the form of Euro VI coaches and buses, which not only knock cars' Euro 6 standard into a cocked hat but by sharing the fuel use, can achieve better than hybrid car levels of emissions per commuter. The only thing stopping this revolution is the length an unreliability of PSV journeys, entirely caused by cars containing one commuter, yet none of the current CAZs propose charging cars... only coaches get charged. Efficient use of roadspace is the only feasible method of cutting emissions and congestion, and that isn't resolved by electric cars or autonomous cars, which use ten times as much roadspace per person

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• IB1 - 14/08/2019 13:34

  I am sick and tired of having diesel cars and cars in general being bashed by every pundit, politician and in this case think tank. Bright Blue is definitely in the draconian end with its recommendation. Successive governments have forced us into diesel cars for decades and now has spun on the spot and said that diesel is the new society evil almost overnight (I personally blame the VW scandal for starting this off). To most people, a car is a major investment which they dont change every year or every other year. They need to keep the car for quite a few years but are being punished by being threatened to pay more tax for owning something that is vilified within its life cycle. I personally dont want to pay more fuel duty just because the government has starting singing from a different hymn sheet and changed its mind on diesel. Unless the government gives a financial incentive for people to change their cars then this will be viewed as a tax raising effort. Even if you got everyone to give up their diesel cars, then what will happen to all these cars. The energy and pollution created to recycle and reprocess the car will raise its own environmental issues.

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• Gordy - 14/08/2019 14:11

  The whole emissions saga is a shambles! Older more polluting vehicles should be penalised, but adding duty to fuel penalises fleets who have high-mileage EU6/RDE 2 vehicles which would get caught up in this. Also, when petrolgate is upon us next July which cars will fleets turn to? A government who charges £315 tax disc every year for the first 5 years even for fully EV vehicles under the current system needs a rethink. Not much joined-up-thinking at the moment, even the car manufacturers were allowed to write the current emissions standards! Madness.

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• Edward Handley - 14/08/2019 20:17

  I love the stuff that these”think tanks” come up with. Lots of ambitious measures without any proper perception of the consequences. Upping diesel duty just puts up prices and increases the rate of inflation. The transport industry runs on diesel - alternative fuels are a tiny fraction of the energy required and will be for a long time yet, and some of them are no where near as green as their advocates would have us believe. The margins the logistics industry runs on are very, very, tight so any increase in costs has to be passed on. It’s not even road transport and diesel cars that create all the pollution - a lot comes from rail, ships, fridge motors, construction plant, etc.. they will pass on the increases as welll. A move to petrol, LPG, CNG or whatever may slightly reduce particulates but only by increasing CO2. Battery electric and PHEV are fine, once you sort out the issues with power generation, but we are a long way from there - currently we buy nuclear generated power from France. You cannot have renewables without nuclear as only nuclear can be brought on line quickly enough when renewable power generation fluctuates, which it does, all the time.

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• Dave - 14/08/2019 22:18

  More unresearched populist nonsense from our lovely politicians. Have they not seen that the modern diesel engine is cleaner than the equivalent petrol engine. CO2 is widely known to be less but with introduction of RDE2 diesels NOx is also on par if not below petrol levels. HMRC have clearly done their homework as diesel subsidy dropped for RDE2. Its pre 2008 diesels that need an incentive to be scrapped and replaced with RDE2

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• Buckets - 19/08/2019 12:16

  Fellow motorists may agree with me that on the road we see many vehicles pumping out smoke either from poorly maintained engines or even worse when modifications have been made to increase fuelling for faster performance. Those vehicles should be weeded out of the UK car pool as soon as possible. Classic car owners only make up a small amount of the driven miles each year so they should still be able to pass an MOT providing that they are serviced correctly. Operators of polluting vehicles may blame cost as a reason for not complying but until they take responsibility of well run vehicles like the rest of us, their vehicles have to go. If scrappage due to MOT failure is a scheme that the government want to run, I see this as a more sensible idea to operating newer, better serviced, compliant vehicles.

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