Serious Diesel Question

[fredgroves]

i'm sure i will regret this, or enjoy the replies - but why is a GTE not an option.

Ahhh now, I knew someone who used to work with me who had one...

When fully charged, its reasonably capable! When running just on petrol its got a small engine and a heavy old battery.

Great, so you just make sure you've got a charge right? Well, travelling distances, backward looking employers, stupid charging durations and houses without drives kinda stick the boot into that one.

I'm sure for some city dwellers its fine, but probably if you live in a city and rarely leave it either E-Golf (which ironically VW have dropped) or just use the bloody bus/tram/tube is a better bet anyway.

As I said, I'd consider any of the current crop of technology to be like buying a thirty grand Psion web phone when the Iphone is coming... I'm sure the science museum would buy it eventually for their forthcoming exhibition "how we failed to quit fossil fuel before the fusion reactor came along"

[fredgroves]

BTW, the one thing that definitely will change by 2040 (or whatever the date finally is) is a replacement tax for fuel duty.

Fuel duty is one of the "big 5" sources of UK government revenue and there is no way they are giving that up without a heavy impact - its quite close to the revenue from corporation tax!

So, somehow they will need to find a way of extracting that same figure from the tax payers.

Possible ideas:

1) Increase VED
2) Force car charging to be metered differently so "vehicle electric use" is taxable by unit consumed

And then factor in the idea that longer term "less people will even use cars altogether" and those of us stuck outside of city centres will have a massive tax hike to pay for an entire country of road infrastructure between us. Its quite possible in my mind that non-city areas become devoid of much habitation altogether, much like pre-railway UK.