I had my car tax reminder recently, for renewal on 1st May for my NC1 2.0 Said £330 a year… I grumbled.
Car MOTed this morning (one of the finest he has seen in years - always nice to hear) so went on line to tax it. £365 the computer said. So I phoned up. Budget they said. Suck it up they said.
So £365 - one pound per day, lighter I wonder how many people feel ripped off like me. It is a second car, covers about 4000 miles a year. I also tax my main car. And I have three motor bikes. And I live on a farm, so none of them get left on the public roads when not in use.
Doesn’t seem fair - accepting that I am in the lucky position of having two cars and three motorbikes, their combined worth is probably less than £12k.
Consider yourself lucky that you dont live in a country where the rate is calculated on official CO2 exhaust figures. I pay about 1000 quid for my ND2 RF here in Austria!
David
If you don’t use it year round, the only other option is to tax it for when you use it. With my previous Mk1 I used to tax it between March to October. I did this with the monthly Direct Debit route, which worked quite well.
Personally, I’d be in favour of a usage-based approach to vehicle excise. So those who drive more, pay more. It seems fair to me, but I can’t see that ever happening here.
I am sure that option is not available in Austria.
Well, it’s pretty much impossible here to avoid using Autobahns (even in the city), so that’s another €96.40 a year. If you want to park on the street outside your house in Vienna, you have to pay for that (and hunt for a space). I prefer to pay €100 per month to park in an underground garage a couple of streets away.
I won’t even mention insurance costs… But at least, there is no ULEZ here – yet!
Should be mileage based, to be fairer. BUT that then introduces Road Pricing, add to ULEZ, Congestion Charges AND a milage charge.
They (who ever that was) thought of scrapping the tax and adding pennies to a litre of fuel - fine idea until the fuel crisis of (insert any year you like here) and they thought there would be riots.
Went back to annual tax and hiked that up, and froze the annual fuel tax inflationary increase so as to make it look like you got a good deal.
Smoke and Mirrors . . .
Denmark farmers had the right idea, got fed up with EU rules saying their pigs were making too many farts, so told to get rid of their herds (? herds) - set up their own political party and got into government! 45% of households in the UK have a car - quite a potential political party
Well according to this lot we are getting off lightly and should be paying twice as much to subsidise those who can afford to buy a 2-ton, 0-60 in 4 seconds, EV.
One of the reasons we are selling both our old 5’s soon in short order, but also they are very old, wont get better without dollops of cash, so upkeep will become an additional issue together with poor consumption etc etc.
Double Road Fund for the pair no longer makes any fiscal logic.
They were cars of their day, now wholly unsuitable, enter “The Dragon” aka ordered a yet unbuilt Suzuki Swift Turbo soft Hybrid. 3 year PCP is less than 35% annually sans MOT, repairs, all in than our two 5’s, after which we will just pay the balloon. It’ll have about 20k on the clock or less anyhow with another 4 years additional warranty! Not to forget half the fuel mpg etc etc and full no quibble warranty.
Times change, so does life. Only need one car now and the Mk1 has not seen daylight since January…I think…
It’s been a fun 17 years…nothing but the 5’s could have delivered better at the price…when everything was a load cheaper.
I cannot complain comming down from £650+ a year my Mazda RX~8 372BHP supercharged too £165.00 for my 2019 MX~5 2.0 ND RF with small remap … Grin Now I get MOT, Car Tax, & Insurance for £495.00 leaving £155.00 for Mods
Just have to suck it up. I offset the costs by sorning from beginning of December until March as I see usage then as minimal, so claw 4 months tax back. I tax for the whole 12 months of course as it works out the cheapest way.
On a brighter note, my daily driver has been £30 tax for 12 months ever since I bought it 9 years ago, go figure:thinking: Will that remain as low, who knows.
We are taxed on usage predominantly, that’s what fuel duty is! VED tax disc is but a drop in the ocean by comparison. They’ve actually scrapped CO2 based tax for vehicles built 2017 onwards, you just get 0 rated and £165 (company car tax is still emissions based though).
You lot need to be careful what you wish for, because road charging is coming and it’s going to ■■■■ over all our chips! Government has been wanting to do it since Alistair Darling was in government and EVs are giving them a very good excuse. Your car will be tracked by GPS/GNS and you will be charged according to what road you drive on, at what time, and where. You can bet your bottom dollar they will use it to enforce speed limits too, like the Welsh 20 mph limit… £££
I had never heard of a Swift Turbo soft Hybrid before, so I looked up Suzuki and discovered that they dont have a proper dealer in Austria – other companies are listed as some kind of agents.
@david-p I think ScottishFiver meant “Mild hybrid”.
All Suzuki Swift Sports are turbo and mild hybrid now I believe, it’s just describing the technology. Mild hybrid isn’t hybrid in the sense most understand it, it’s more an excuse for manufacturers to slap the green point-scoring badging on things; accessories are run by electricity that is recovered from braking, and most systems give a little propulsion assist for a brief period but not enough to move the car without using the engine. Think of it as enhanced stop/start on drugs.
The Fiat 500 is the worst offender here, it gives 1 extra hp - one. The Swift Sport is rather more generous, you get 13 hp thanks to a 48V system.
It is, indeed, a racket. Just a means of squeezing as much out of the populace as they can. Talk about the water companies and pollution, the government takes money, doesnt repair the potholes, and fritters away billions on over-budget and behind-schedule projects like HS2!
