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Road pricing back on the agenda to replace loss of fuel and vehicle excise duty due to electric vehicles?

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apk55

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Most modern cars can last for 20+ years before corrosion or age related problems write them off. Mechanically most can last for 200,000 miles if cared for although lot of cold starts and short journeys can reduce this.
However many do not make it this far because
1/ Accident damage and not worth repairing
2/ Serious mechanical failure that is not worth repairing
3/ High and aggressive usage causing mechanical failure that is not worth fixing
4/ None availability of spares
5/ No demand in the second hand market. This particularly applies to expensive cars that are often expensive to run and insure

Modern cars are defiantly much more durable than those in the past. I remember my first car rusting through panels in five years (ford escort MK1) but my current car as a 13 year old Citroen C1 has little rust
 
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AM9

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Referring back to the thing about life-expired batteries on old Leafs (being the first, and therefore oldest available used EVs) - I saw just the other day a YouTube video about refreshing a 1st gen 9-year old Leaf. It refused to start, with no available power from the traction battery.
Long story short: some diagnostics later and it was discovered that one of the bank of batteries that made up the pack had failed. Two hours labour to remove the pack, pull out the bad component and replace it with one new one (cost £1000) and the thing was good to go for 85 miles, which is representative of the car when it was new. That had apparently been the only major expense on the vehicle since new.
Not seen that video but Robert Llewellyn has been driving a Nissan Leaf and has a channel called 'fullychargedshow' on You Tube. A few months ago he was reporting that his 9 year old car's battery needed replacing and his was being fitted by a dutch company. They were also fitting a much higher capacity battery to extend the original range of his Leaf from what it was (ISTR 24Kw) 73 miles to something well over 100 miles, the new battery fitting into the same space. Worth a watch for some of the doubters.
 

Bletchleyite

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Referring back to the thing about life-expired batteries on old Leafs (being the first, and therefore oldest available used EVs) - I saw just the other day a YouTube video about refreshing a 1st gen 9-year old Leaf. It refused to start, with no available power from the traction battery.
Long story short: some diagnostics later and it was discovered that one of the bank of batteries that made up the pack had failed. Two hours labour to remove the pack, pull out the bad component and replace it with one new one (cost £1000) and the thing was good to go for 85 miles, which is representative of the car when it was new. That had apparently been the only major expense on the vehicle since new.

I had a Vectra which was 3 years old when I bought it, kept it until about 7 years old then sold it to a mate who drove it for a few more years then traded it in for something newer. I spent nowhere near £1000 on it, and I'm pretty sure all he needed on it was discs and pads. I think when I had it it needed a coil spring and a partial exhaust, servicing aside.

£1K is pretty hefty.
 

The Ham

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I had a Vectra which was 3 years old when I bought it, kept it until about 7 years old then sold it to a mate who drove it for a few more years then traded it in for something newer. I spent nowhere near £1000 on it, and I'm pretty sure all he needed on it was discs and pads. I think when I had it it needed a coil spring and a partial exhaust, servicing aside.

£1K is pretty hefty.

You would almost certainly spend over £1,000 in fuel, for those doing 10,000 miles a year that could be racked up in a year.

If you spend £1,000 and save 5p per mile in fuel costs then you've only got to do 20,000 miles (2-3 years of milage for most people) before you recoup the costs. Only, unless you've got a very new car, then chances are you'd be looking at more of a fuel saving than that and so fewer miles still. That's before you consider VED savings (which even at £20/year reduce the numbers needed to be traveled by 400/year).

Yes the costs are much more upfront, however cars are expensive. A lot of people don't realise how expensive as they pay a bit here and a bit there and don't fully know what it costs them.

I'll say it again (as I've said it on similar threads before and get a load of doubt) the average cost of car ownership is over £3,000 a year (yes there will be some who may manage to get it before this, but not many below £2,000 unless they are doing fairly low mileage, i.e. sub 8,000 miles, but then that's how averages work).

At 10,000 miles at 10p a mile that's £1,000, VED of £140, insurance of £300, MOT & maintenance of £180, new tyres averaging £80/year and £100/month in purchase costs and your at £2,900.

£3,600 over 3 years (£100 x 36 months) is buy a car for £7,000 sell it on for £3,400.

Lease costs are likely to be more than that, but may reduce other costs to balance things out a bit. However would likely need a bit upfront as well, so overall probably a little higher and the very cheap leases (sub £150) would likely only be on a fairly small car. However you'll still be paying about £3,000 a year unless you keep your milage low (also remember you'll be paying an extra amount for any miles above the, say, 6,000 miles the lease agreement allows for).

You may get lucky with a low cost car which doesn't need much doing to it, had a high MPG rate, you may be able to do the maintenance yourself, and so on. However that's the exception and even then, unless you're doing lower milage then you'll likely still be looking at £1,500/year of not £2,000/year.

However for most people the fuel cost savings of an electric car (as it'fuel costs for an EV are easily 5p/mile - 110mpg, possibly 8p/mile - 68mpg, and maybe even a little more, as 11p/mile is 50mpg*) will likely win out (as electric charging is about 4p/mile, so you'd have to have a very fuel efficient car, so fairly new, and drive it fairly carefully to get much less than about 4p/mile in savings).

* Fuel costs based on 120p/l so prices may change a little of you are able to pay less than that, but probably not by a whole lot.
 

johnnychips

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There is an interesting article on recycling lithium batteries here:

Industry analysts predict that by 2020, China alone will generate some 500,000 metric tons of used Li-ion batteries and that by 2030, the worldwide number will hit 2 million metric tons per year.

If current trends for handling these spent batteries hold, most of those batteries may end up in landfills even though Li-ion batteries can be recycled. These popular power packs contain valuable metals and other materials that can be recovered, processed, and reused. But very little recycling goes on today. In Australia, for example, only 2–3% of Li-ion batteries are collected and sent offshore for recycling, according to Naomi J. Boxall, an environmental scientist at Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO). The recycling rates in the European Union and the US—less than 5%—aren’t much higher....
It basically says that at the moment only 5% of batteries are being recycled, but there is a lot of research going on to improve this.
 
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Bletchleyite

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Yes the costs are much more upfront, however cars are expensive. A lot of people don't realise how expensive as they pay a bit here and a bit there and don't fully know what it costs them.

That's fairly significant, though. Finding a grand as an emergency thing is hard for most people.
 

The Ham

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That's fairly significant, though. Finding a grand as an emergency thing is hard for most people.

Indeed, however the battery would show signs of reduced range before it stopped working altogether, however even if you've got to put it on a credit card and pay 20% interest for 12 months as you pay off £100/month that's not all that big a deal for most people who own cars. Especially given that they would otherwise be spending (say) £60 of that if they still had an ICE car on fuel and VED.

That's assuming that you've not put aside £10/month from those fuel savings to cover such a battery failure, which would take you 8 years to fully fund that £1,000 but could cut your monthly costs on your credit card bill for one year to £60 after a little over 3 years.

However that would still only be the case on a battery out of warranty, so for those cars over 8 years old, and add long as you're aware of the risks then that's something which each person will have to consider.

Anyway it's entirely possible that with an ICE car that you could find that you've got an expensive repair (maybe not even £500) but doesn't have the fuel savings that a battery car has to offset those costs.

There is an interesting article on recycling lithium batteries here:


It basically says that at the moment only 5% of batteries are being recycled, but there is a lot of research going on to improve this.

How much of that is down to people not getting rid of their old tech and it just gathering dust in a draw somewhere?

As most batteries are currently small and a lot of people just can't be bothered to recycle then correctly; that's different with a great big car battery, where it's likely to need to be removed by a specialist.
 

SynthD

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A good example would be for someone who lives in the sticks, needs to leave for work at 05.00hrs and there are no trains due to a tree on the line or landslide. How else are they supposed to get to work?

Once again, the car user gets clobbered....

The Government took the decision to spend massively on furlough schemes etc. and increase national debt. - perhaps they should look to themselves to raise the extra tax revenues
Rail users are also clobbered in that case.
Look to themselves? I don’t know what that means. This discussion is about maintaining the 40bn from drivers.
 

Harpers Tate

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Recycling will come. It will either come because it's effectively enforced (or co-erced) by government action, or it will come as the cost of so doing becomes lower than the cost of fresh mining (whether due to increased mining costs and/or reduced availability of ores, or from lower recycling costs, or both). Or it will cease to be an issue if or when there is a new battery technology that uses different chemistry altogether.
 

The Ham

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Because it wouldn't be fair on somebody who has no choice to take the car because public transport can't be relied upon. Also, somebody who might work irregular hours, have to be in places quickly by certain times and can't get on a bus because it is "full" with 20 people on board or school kids.

A good example would be for someone who lives in the sticks, needs to leave for work at 05.00hrs and there are no trains due to a tree on the line or landslide. How else are they supposed to get to work? Why should that person be penalised for taking their car instead?

Why should the car driver be heavily penalised when they already pay VED and tax on fuel?

Once again, the car user gets clobbered....

And if you live outside London, bus fares can be very expensive and taking the car would be cheaper

The Government took the decision to spend massively on furlough schemes etc. and increase national debt. - perhaps they should look to themselves to raise the extra tax revenues

The problem is that those in rural settings make up 15% of the population, however that 15% is likely to not fall into "in the sticks" in the above quote.

As I fall into that rural setting as defined by the government and my village (maybe town but don't tell the locals they get grumpy if you call it a town) of 9,000 has an hourly bus service and a half hourly train service, there's two other nearby villages (both circa 5,000 people), one has a half hourly bus service and is about 1 to 2 miles from a half hourly train service and the other has an hourly bus service and is 2 to 3 miles from my village.

As such if more people were to use public transport them chances are the services would improve (or at least it wouldn't require much subsidy to increase the frequency as the existing services are run without any subsidy).

There's always going to be cars of "I know someone who does [insert unlikely event] and so electric cars aren't any good" when actually for most people they are fine and in many settings may be better than the existing setup (subject to costs falling a little, so that fuel cost savings become less critical and infrastructure improving so that there's more charging points).

For those who fall into such cases, then as the infrastructure improves then chances are they then start to move towards it being better.

I would also question how much extra it's going to cost of you have to go to work by car rather than train because there's a tree on the line, it's not something that happens now than a few times a year and so even if it costs you an extra £10 each time is likely to be less than £50 a year. Even if you had to get a cab and or cost £50 each time then the annual cost is likely to still be £100, maybe £150 if you're really unlucky (assuming that you can't club together with a couple of other travelers to split the cost).
 

37424

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I'm slightly puzzled as to how someone thinks £1000 is a lot, a typical basic service and MOT from and independent garage is likely to cost you a couple of hundred, from a main dealer its more likely to be £400 and that before you get into things like, tyres, brake disks, pads, cambelt changes, clutches etc.

The costs are going to come down for electric cars, my cousin has just got hold of a new MG ZS for 20k with 150 mile range and its a chinese bargin for the money, there a few models with 40kW batteries which can be had around the 24K with around 150 to 200 mile range mark and 60KW batteries around the 30K mark with 200+ miles range. I believe Dacia will be bringing out something shortly which will be very price competative.

The key thing is to get people to change is that the running costs and particularly fuel costs are much cheaper which as we know is unsustainable in the long run, I gather that for those that have had electric vehicles for a number of years quite a few of the charging points used to be free but that increasingly no longer the case although the electric charge is still significantly cheaper than petrol at present, but electric cars will become more expensive to run in the long term and to couteract that the government will no doubt try and make fossil fuel cars even more expensive.
 

Bletchleyite

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Tbf it's roughly the same price as a new clutch and Dual mass flywheel.

While you can be unlucky, most drivers who respect their car will not need to replace either of those - they can both easily do 10+ years. If you slip the clutch all the time, rest your foot on the clutch while driving and do jerky gearchanges you might.

Back to the batteries, I wonder if we will see a move to a leasing/"power as a service" model to avoid this high cost? Bus companies often lease their tyres (this being why you sometimes see a bus for sale "excluding tyres").
 

cactustwirly

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I'm slightly puzzled as to how someone thinks £1000 is a lot, a typical basic service and MOT from and independent garage is likely to cost you a couple of hundred, from a main dealer its more likely to be £400 and that before you get into things like, tyres, brake disks, pads, cambelt changes, clutches etc.

The costs are going to come down for electric cars, my cousin has just got hold of a new MG ZS for 20k with 150 mile range and its a chinese bargin for the money, there a few models with 40kW batteries which can be had around the 24K with around 150 to 200 mile range mark and 60KW batteries around the 30K mark with 200+ miles range. I believe Dacia will be bringing out something shortly which will be very price competative.

The key thing is to get people to change is that the running costs and particularly fuel costs are much cheaper which as we know is unsustainable in the long run, I gather that for those that have had electric vehicles for a number of years quite a few of the charging points used to be free but that increasingly no longer the case although the electric charge is still significantly cheaper than petrol at present, but electric cars will become more expensive to run in the long term and to couteract that the government will no doubt try and make fossil fuel cars even more expensive.

Electric cars still need tyres and brakes, and suspension bushes etc.
More so actually as the extra weight of the batteries means they'll go through tyres and brake pads more quickly.

A cambelt costs £200 to replace and only needs doing once every 10 years, and you can do.a service yourself at home for about £30-40
 

Bletchleyite

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However for most people the fuel cost savings of an electric car (as it'fuel costs for an EV are easily 5p/mile - 110mpg, possibly 8p/mile - 68mpg, and maybe even a little more, as 11p/mile is 50mpg*) will likely win out (as electric charging is about 4p/mile, so you'd have to have a very fuel efficient car, so fairly new, and drive it fairly carefully to get much less than about 4p/mile in savings).

For now. Once road pricing kicks in, that will likely bring EV costs closer to present ICE costs (though I'd expect it to be "on top" for ICEs, after all the Government needs some tax rises! :) )

My diesel Ford Kuga does pretty much dead on 50mpg, FWIW, and that's not a small car. Not everyone is driving round in a Range Rover.
 

37424

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While you can be unlucky, most drivers who respect their car will not need to replace either of those - they can both easily do 10+ years. If you slip the clutch all the time, rest your foot on the clutch while driving and do jerky gearchanges you might.

Back to the batteries, I wonder if we will see a move to a leasing/"power as a service" model to avoid this high cost? Bus companies often lease their tyres (this being why you sometimes see a bus for sale "excluding tyres").
I'm not sure about that didn't some early electric's like the Zoe have leased batteries and we seem to have gone away from that now.
 

Bletchleyite

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A cambelt costs £200 to replace and only needs doing once every 10 years, and you can do.a service yourself at home for about £30-40

And even if you don't Kwik Fit etc (or your local backstreet spanner monkey) don't charge a king's ransom. It is not necessary to go to a main dealer for servicing, and the mind boggles as to why so many people waste their money doing so. The law does not permit the warranty to be affected by servicing elsewhere provided they do what's in the book.
 

37424

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Electric cars still need tyres and brakes, and suspension bushes etc.
More so actually as the extra weight of the batteries means they'll go through tyres and brake pads more quickly.

A cambelt costs £200 to replace and only needs doing once every 10 years, and you can do.a service yourself at home for about £30-40
Who actually services their own car these days especially given the complexity of modern cars, heck my Uncle who was a car mechanic for 25 years from the 60's to the 80's lifts the bonnet of a modern car, scatches his head and puts the bonnet down again.

If they have regen braking which many do then they would probably use brake pads less, and ok may be a bit heavier but overall the maintenance should be much less.
 

The Ham

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For now. Once road pricing kicks in, that will likely bring EV costs closer to present ICE costs (though I'd expect it to be "on top" for ICEs, after all the Government needs some tax rises! :) )

My diesel Ford Kuga does pretty much dead on 50mpg, FWIW, and that's not a small car. Not everyone is driving round in a Range Rover.

I would expect that road pricing kicks on that it would be applied to all vehicles with ICE vehicles seeing their rates going up faster than other modes.

If we were to see a 1p/mile charge we'd likely see EV's rising at a slower rate than ICE vehicles. Possibly to the extent that after 5 years EV's might be 2p/mile but ICE's might be 3p/mile (if this started at 2025, such a difference would be at 2030), at similar rates of increase by 2040 it'll be 8p/mile for EV's and 27p/mile for ICE's. Which would continue to increase the cost savings of owning an EV over an ICE vehicle.

After 2040 (when the remaining ICE vehicles would be a minimum of 10 years old) most remaining cars would likely to be low milage (where the extra costs would be minimal) and/or classic cars. Either way the numbers would likely to be small. However after that I'd suggest that the increases would likely rise more slowly for ICE vehicles (although at the same rate as the EV's).

At an average of 10p/mile would only raise £28 billion a year on current road usage rates, so it would likely need to be a slightly faster rate of growth on the EV's unless there's a non zero rate of VED for EV's. It may even need to average 15p/mile (£42bn) to be comparable to what is currently the case. Of course any non UK vehicle could also be charged the per mile rate, either at point of departure or when scrapped/sold on with the person who first brought the car to the UK being responsible for the charges until registered with the DVLA that it's been sold on to someone else at which point they are then responsible.
 

Bletchleyite

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You've brought up a big advantage there - road pricing can also be applied to foreign lorries, who may no longer have a competitive advantage over UK based companies by being able to buy their diesel somewhere where it's lower-taxed.

Germany's LKW-Maut (lorry tax) is for this sort of purpose.
 

edwin_m

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I would expect that road pricing kicks on that it would be applied to all vehicles with ICE vehicles seeing their rates going up faster than other modes.

If we were to see a 1p/mile charge we'd likely see EV's rising at a slower rate than ICE vehicles. Possibly to the extent that after 5 years EV's might be 2p/mile but ICE's might be 3p/mile (if this started at 2025, such a difference would be at 2030), at similar rates of increase by 2040 it'll be 8p/mile for EV's and 27p/mile for ICE's. Which would continue to increase the cost savings of owning an EV over an ICE vehicle.

After 2040 (when the remaining ICE vehicles would be a minimum of 10 years old) most remaining cars would likely to be low milage (where the extra costs would be minimal) and/or classic cars. Either way the numbers would likely to be small. However after that I'd suggest that the increases would likely rise more slowly for ICE vehicles (although at the same rate as the EV's).

At an average of 10p/mile would only raise £28 billion a year on current road usage rates, so it would likely need to be a slightly faster rate of growth on the EV's unless there's a non zero rate of VED for EV's. It may even need to average 15p/mile (£42bn) to be comparable to what is currently the case. Of course any non UK vehicle could also be charged the per mile rate, either at point of departure or when scrapped/sold on with the person who first brought the car to the UK being responsible for the charges until registered with the DVLA that it's been sold on to someone else at which point they are then responsible.
I think it would be better to retain the fuel tax instead of a differential road charging rate for ICEs versus EVs. This is a de facto mileage charge already, but also penalizes less efficient vehicles and driving techniques, and is a pretty good surrogate for many of the environmental downsides. There might be a case for varying the road charge by vehicle weight to reflect extra road maintenance costs, which would have the effect of making some EVs pay more than equivalent ICEs.
 

Bald Rick

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Back to the batteries, I wonder if we will see a move to a leasing/"power as a service" model to avoid this high cost? Bus companies often lease their tyres (this being why you sometimes see a bus for sale "excluding tyres"

The Renault Zoe usually has a battery lease option. Most other manufacturers haven’t done this for some reason.


A cambelt costs £200 to replace and only needs doing once every 10 years, and you can do.a service yourself at home for about £30-40

My cambelt is every 60k miles and over £300. And whilst you can do a home service, very very few people are competent to do so, or have the right tools, or the time, or the desire. It also means you don’t get the service stamp which is often an issue for newer cars on the aftersales market.

I have occasionally serviced my last two cars myself, but it doesn’t help when your brake discs are worn or the suspension bushes go or a gaiter needs changing - it still needs to go to the garage. Besides, the incremental cost of a service done at the same time as an MoT is only about £80 when you do them together and that includes about £50 of oil.
 

Harpers Tate

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...........they'll go through tyres and brake pads more quickly
May be true as regards tyres. Is not true as regards brake components. EVs use their brakes for any a tiny fraction of the slowing process in normal driving/braking.
 

Bald Rick

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I’ve asked my EV friends about tyre use - none of them have reported any significant difference.

Brake wear largely non existent though.
 

ainsworth74

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Yes, regenerative breaking means the traditional brakes rarely get used if you drive carefully.

What is this "drive carefully" of which you speak? :lol: (I kid of course ;))

Have to say I really cannot wait to wangle myself an EV rather an petrol powered car for the reasons above (cheaper to run, more reliable, fun to drive, etc etc). I keep looking at the second hand market and it's not that far away from my budget. Give it a few more years and it'll be there. The real question in the interim is whether I can keep my plucky Ford Fiesta going long enough so that I don't have to have another petrol car and the next vehicle I buy can be electric.
 

Bletchleyite

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My cambelt is every 60k miles and over £300.

60K is very low for a cambelt - I wonder if the manufacturer found an issue that required them to reduce the interval. 100K/10 years or even higher is more common. Though I do wish they would use chains instead and avoid the issue entirely; the whole idea of a cambelt is just a really awful piece of design when it comes to interference engines (all of them these days) - a consumable that can cause catastrophic failure if it does fail is just ridiculous.

And whilst you can do a home service, very very few people are competent to do so, or have the right tools, or the time, or the desire. It also means you don’t get the service stamp which is often an issue for newer cars on the aftersales market.

Might be if selling privately, though not necessarily because some buyers will ascribe value to a driver who knows their car and cares for it properly themselves and can talk about what they've done and how. Trade in won't care as long as it has been serviced. I usually just sign the book myself when I do it, and put the receipts for any parts in the folder with the book. On no occasion has this caused me any issue at all.

I have occasionally serviced my last two cars myself, but it doesn’t help when your brake discs are worn or the suspension bushes go or a gaiter needs changing - it still needs to go to the garage. Besides, the incremental cost of a service done at the same time as an MoT is only about £80 when you do them together and that includes about £50 of oil.

Different people can do different levels of things. I did try to do a set of discs once but couldn't get them off as the screws were too tight. Pads are easy, though, and you can have two sets of pads for every one set of discs in most cases, unless they are damaged or left too late and score the disc.

What is this "drive carefully" of which you speak? :lol: (I kid of course ;))

Have to say I really cannot wait to wangle myself an EV rather an petrol powered car for the reasons above (cheaper to run, more reliable, fun to drive, etc etc). I keep looking at the second hand market and it's not that far away from my budget. Give it a few more years and it'll be there. The real question in the interim is whether I can keep my plucky Ford Fiesta going long enough so that I don't have to have another petrol car and the next vehicle I buy can be electric.

Having just acquired a new (used) vehicle in July, I would be very surprised if my next one (likely in 3-5 years or so) wasn't an electric. Or if it isn't it'll be a plug-in hybrid.

I think it would be better to retain the fuel tax instead of a differential road charging rate for ICEs versus EVs. This is a de facto mileage charge already, but also penalizes less efficient vehicles and driving techniques, and is a pretty good surrogate for many of the environmental downsides. There might be a case for varying the road charge by vehicle weight to reflect extra road maintenance costs, which would have the effect of making some EVs pay more than equivalent ICEs.

I think this is very likely - abolish VED other than a first-time tax on registration, and have both road pricing and fuel tax applying to ICE cars, but only road pricing to electrics.
 

miami

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Of course one small sample in one town on a Saturday afternoon does not make solid evidence.

No, it doesn't. In a typical 2 car family that use both for commuting, there may be a newer car and an older car. During the week both are used, during the weekend only one is likely to be used, and that will be the newer one. For what it's worth I went down the road today and saw about 75% of cars were older than 12 plates, so depends on the area you live in.

If a 10 year old nissan leaf is £6k, there's no way the bottom-end of the market is going to be buying electric any time soon. A 2011 Nissan Micra is in the £1-2k range.

A new Nissan micra will cost £15k, and last 10 years at 5,000 miles a year without major expense for about £500 a year in petrol (£1.20/mile, 50mpg), £150 in VED. You might need 2 sets of brake pads in that time, so £30 a year. Total cost about £22k

A leaf will cost you £27k upfront (including subsidy) plus £150 a year in electric (based on 15kWh/100km and 12p/unit). Tyres will cost at least as much as the micra. Lets assume no brake issues. You're talking over £28k.

So you're saving £5k with the petrol version, and getting far more usability (the ability to do occasional cross-country journeys for example)

Electric cars will certainly come to dominate the £40k style range, I'd far rather have a Tesla than an Audi if I were into fancy cars, but for your typical small car used for a commute, there has to be a major collapse at the small end of the market. Trouble is that that will lead the demand for some form of road charging (even if it's a flat price per mile) to offset the money lost from not selling petrol for those cars, and that will further tip the balance away from small electric cars.


Personally my opinion is that, for all but completely rural areas, the future would ideally be "active transport" for short journeys and public transport for longer journeys, accompanied possibly with a system of driverless taxis to cover journeys where there is an important reason to use a private vehicle.

If we can't do an automated railway we're not going to be seeing automated taxis in the next 20 years. If we did, say goodbye to many rail stations. Your idea that public transport will be of any use for the 8,000 people living in the 3 council wards near me with a combined 12 bus services a day shows a lack of understanding of 'rural areas'. Villages with 2,000 people are not completely rural. Some might even have a regular bus service to one town or another.

Take Tarporley for example, 2500 people live in the village, but the surrounding council ward bumps that to 5,000. There's an hourly bus to Chester and one to Nantwich and Crewe. How does someone living in Tarporley get to Winsford, 10 miles away, for work? Northwich?


Elecritc cars will be great, but there are still two issues
1) At 15kwh for 100km, 330b km a year will take 50 TWh per year, requiring a 15% increase in electricity production. Not as bad as I thought, but still a significant amount of extra capacity.
2) 25% of cars are normally parked on the street (or often on the pavement), that's 8 million. How will they charge?


My £20 a year VED isn't remotely covering any road maintenance costs

VED from cars raises about £5b a year.

Councils spend about £1b a year on road maintenence - https://www.driving.co.uk/news/councils-spent-2bn-road-repairs-since-2017/

Highways agency spends a similar amount - https://assets.publishing.service.g...ds/attachment_data/file/374676/FOI_712722.pdf

Capital improvements have been costing about £3b a year centrally (councils don't have enough money build new roads outside of s106 agreements), but this is doubling to £6b for the next 5 years.

So for the last 5 years VED alone has covered all road spending, including capital.

Other road related taxes aside from petrol and vat on petrol includes VAT on new cars (3 million cars at say 20k a year = 12b). If everyone walked, where would the money to fill that hole come from?
 

Domh245

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60K is very low for a cambelt - I wonder if the manufacturer found an issue that required them to reduce the interval. 100K/10 years or even higher is more common. Though I do wish they would use chains instead and avoid the issue entirely; the whole idea of a cambelt is just a really awful piece of design when it comes to interference engines (all of them these days) - a consumable that can cause catastrophic failure if it does fail is just ridiculous.

It's pretty much only the cheapest petrols and some diesels that retain cambelts these days. The danger of going to timing chains is that you "do a BMW" and make timing chain guides out of cheese, or tensioners that fail unsafe and grenade the engine as well now with the added complication of a much harder service to change it. Thankfully it seems they've mostly managed to design that away now but it's not as cut & dry as you might hope and some manufacturers do still have a bad rep for poor timing chains
 

edwin_m

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VED from cars raises about £5b a year.

Councils spend about £1b a year on road maintenence - https://www.driving.co.uk/news/councils-spent-2bn-road-repairs-since-2017/

Highways agency spends a similar amount - https://assets.publishing.service.g...ds/attachment_data/file/374676/FOI_712722.pdf

Capital improvements have been costing about £3b a year centrally (councils don't have enough money build new roads outside of s106 agreements), but this is doubling to £6b for the next 5 years.

So for the last 5 years VED alone has covered all road spending, including capital.

Other road related taxes aside from petrol and vat on petrol includes VAT on new cars (3 million cars at say 20k a year = 12b). If everyone walked, where would the money to fill that hole come from?
What about road policing costs, and NHS costs arising from road accidents?
 
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