ADUK Archive

According to the news, diesel is back to being cheaper than petrol.

The thing is, I can never remember a time when diesel was cheaper than petrol. At least, not in the UK.

WhoseGeneration wrote:http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2015-07-16/news/64495324_1_ultra-low-sulphur-diesel-market-shar

Interesting stuff, but apparently diesel used to be cheaper than petrol - all the old folk keep banging on about it. But I can't remember this ever being the case. At least not since the days when forecourts only had one diesel pump (that's even if they had one for cars) and very few cars used diesel.

About 7 or 8 years ago.

It was certainly cheaper when I first got a diesel in 2004

I can't remember when duty was raised to make DERV more expensive than petrol but it was raised when the news of the possible carcinogenic effects of PM10 particles started to worry Government.

Prior to that DERV was cheaper than petrol by a few pence per gallon. THis differential, combined with the better fuel economy of Diesel cars helped to keep the payback mileage sensible (the distance you needed to cover to make back the higher purchase cost in fuel savings).

The biggest annoyance then was that DERV was pence cheaper than petrol here but in countries with a higher percentage of Diesel cars, such as France and Italy, DERV was substantially cheaper than petrol, here or there.

jonquirk wrote:I can't remember when duty was raised to make DERV more expensive than petrol

Duty on diesel for cars is the same as for petrol (by volume).

Angus wrote:About 7 or 8 years ago.

It was certainly cheaper when I first got a diesel in 2004

You must be mistaken. I got my first diesel car in 1992. Diesel has always been more expensive since then. I believe the last time it was cheaper was around 1991 according to some article I've read recently.

That's why I find it odd when people keep banging on about diesel being more expensive than petrol these days. That's been the case for nearly 25 years!

Duty on petrol and diesel (per unit volume) hasn't always been the same [pdf] but whenever they haven't been the same they seem to have tracked fairly closely since at least 1989, and the variation in price at the pumps has almost entirely been based on raw material price.

I think I remember comparisons with some other European countries that used a percentage for fuel duty instead of a per litre amount.

I think the diesel duty will go up against petrol, given that there are now more diesel passenger vehicles as well as the traditional lorries. More demand for diesel = easy revenue generator for the government. I guess, and I think the government knows too, that people are not going to suddenly switch their cars from diesel and petrol and the usage on transportation is not going to drop off materially.

Garrison wrote:I guess, and I think the government knows too, that people are not going to suddenly switch their cars from diesel and petrol and the usage on transportation is not going to drop off materially.

If they took fixing air pollution seriously, they could offer a scrappage scheme to encourage those mis-sold diesels to move to petrol (by mis-sold, people doing low miles/city miles who will never operate the car efficiently, and suffer problems in particular with DPFs).

The main driver for the high proportion of diesels in the fleet has been basing car tax, company car tax and the annual road fund tax on CO2. Which of those has yet been changed?

Can anyone explain the environmental impact of a modern diesel against a modern petrol? It took me years to buy a car which drinks the devil's brew, and now it looks as though it may be not only my first diesel but also my last.

waremark wrote:The main driver for the high proportion of diesels in the fleet has been basing car tax, company car tax and the annual road fund tax on CO2. Which of those has yet been changed?

car tax is changing from 2017 according to the last budget and won't be based on CO2 any more

Alasdair

akirk wrote:

waremark wrote:The main driver for the high proportion of diesels in the fleet has been basing car tax, company car tax and the annual road fund tax on CO2. Which of those has yet been changed?

car tax is changing from 2017 according to the last budget and won't be based on CO2 any more

Alasdair

It's bad news for those of us who can't afford to change cars with changes in government policy. I'm on my second diesel (2008 with DPF) and bought it as a long-into-retirement car. Will I be taxed off the road as well as out of the city? Perhaps SDave is right and I should be scrapped. For those who are less well off they tend to buy (rather...have to buy) older and more polluting cars.

Any scrappage scheme (and I don't think breath holding is wise) is unlikely to be of much help. On the other hand a large subsidy for expensive electric vehicles (hide your carbon in a power station route) is only useful for those who could probably afford them in any case.

I think (?) the high carbon cost is in producing the thing in the first place - so scrappage schemes are a 'mixed blessing'.

Ian

Agree with you Ian.

Living and driving in central London will change a lot over the next 5 years with the introduction of the ultra-low emission zone.

My feeling is that the criteria for diesel cars is much stringent than petrol - in the sense that you have to have a much newer vehicle to qualify for exemption from the daily charge

Petrol - Euro 4 - A petrol car or small van manufactured since 1 January 2006 will meet the ULEZ standards.

Diesel - Euro 6 - If you currently have a diesel car or small van, it will not meet the ULEZ standards. All cars and small vans manufactured from September 2015 will meet the standards.

Charge will be £12.50 per day on top of the congestion charge of £10 per day. So £22.50 a day to drive to work ... or £5,400 per year if you work 5 days a week and 48 weeks a year.

revian wrote:I'm on my second diesel (2008 with DPF) and bought it as a long-into-retirement car. Will I be taxed off the road as well as out of the city?

Nah, it'll break down in a terminally expensive way long before you have to worry about that.

/seriously, does anyone expect cars bought within the last few years to still be cost effective to run by the time they are 15 or 20 years old?

jont wrote:/seriously, does anyone expect cars bought within the last few years to still be cost effective to run by the time they are 15 or 20 years old?

Yes, Wendy and I are looking at SUVs right now. We looked at new Mitsubishi Outlander plug-in 4x4 as a new company car (low tax due to 44g CO2 and 145 mpg), or a few-year-old Land Cruisers and G-Class specifically, and we expect them to run for 25 years and 250,000 miles.

Our old family Land Cruisers Amazon 4.0 petrol in-line 6 lasted 325,000 km in Australia in throughout the 90s and 00s before we sold it. As far as I know, the car is still working.