Luxury car tax petition

[WannabeOwner]

"No matter who you vote for the Government always gets in"

 

[davidmc]

I won't be signing.

I'm still using roads, I'm still causing congestion

I'm sorry but Road tax (VED) is not used for this purpose. All Tax payers pay for roads not just motorists.

 

[Jason71]

That is the key point.

This is meant to be a tax on luxury vehicles, yet for exactly the same level of luxury the EV driver pays it and the ICE driver does not.
Even if you view it as a tax on having too much cash to spare, for a car with exactly the same monthly ownership costs, the EV will pay the tax but the ICE will not, because the ICE costs are loaded towards running cost while EV are loaded towards initial purchase price.

To be fair, assuming this tax is a good idea in the first place, the threshold should be higher for EVs than ICEs.

The history is that the DFT reduced the VED on vehicles with less than around 120g/km of Co2 down to between £0 and £20 to to encourage low emissions vehicles. the problem was that the manufactures got very very good at hitting this/fiddling it (delete as applicable) very very quickly. For example by 2017 every single Fiesta apart from the ST had an engine that could crack that level and the revenue from VED tumbled. The gov. urgently wanted to increase revenue but increasing rates for those cars already sold on the basis of low VED would have been too much for even our current government to think they could get away with so as a result they left them alone.
That meant they needed to raise the rates on new vehicles and by a lot to compensate. But again there is only so much that they could get away with and the blanket £140 introduced in April 17 was thought to be it.
BUT
It still wasn't enough to cover the shortfall. So how could they raise additional income without facing a public backlash?
Easy. ART the so called "luxury car tax". An extra £1550 per vehicle kerching and good luck anyone who can afford a £40k car trying to elicit any kind of public support against it on the basis of fairness.
And that is how it is.

 

[Pete1]

Someone started a government petition. Posting here to try and get some more signatures
Petition: Abolish the Luxury Car Tax for EVs (Electric Vehicles)

 

[squarepeg77]

Interesting arguments.

Petition was on 999 signatures when I looked... well, there was no way I was going to leave it on 3 figures!