Dealer’s Diary
Steven Ward asks if Britain’s love affair with diesels is over.
On the morning of the last Saturday in February, I almost felt pity for anyone who’d ordered a new diesel car for March 1 delivery. The headlines on all the rolling news channels prior to that Wednesday’s 17-plate collection strongly warned against buying cars which ran on heavy oil. Those warnings haven’t abated since. In fact, they’ve got worse. What are the government playing at and will this affect the demand for diesel cars?
The short answer is no. Sure, people will briefly consider going back to petrol, but then they’ll buy the diesel anyway. The manufacturers have invested too heavily to turn back now.
It’s not as if the government actually intends to do anything sensible about the dire health and environmental problems stemming from diesel emissions. For politicians, environmental protection is an ideal excuse to levy increased parking and congestion charges onto the diesel motorist.
On April 1, 2017, five weeks after the start of the demonising of diesels, the car tax rules changed once again. As before, they favoured diesel cars because the taxation is based on naturally-occurring CO2 gas and not the nasty NOX emissions. Can you see the rank hypocrisy here? The MOT test is highly favourable to diesels – the test can’t detect remaps or removed DPFS, so those actively avoiding the legislative attempts to clean up diesel emissions are still safe from prosecution. And did the government impose sanctions on VAG for cheating emissions and adding to the polluted atmosphere? Of course they didn’t. If they had, why would we be importing more VAG products than ever?
The customer is now addicted to that stonking low-down shove a modern turbo diesel offers. Likewise, 50mpg and a low road tax bill is the norm. Nobody is willingly going to double their road tax, halve their mpg and hunt down a big turbo petrol to retain such lusty performance.
I’m not a fan of diesel, but I can understand why it accounts for half of the UK’S new car sales and why there is such a strong demand on the used market. For most of the UK, diesel vehicles command a premium price and sell faster over their petrol equivalents.
If the government really did want to get the public back into petrol cars, they’d need to revise (again) VED and cut petrol duty, before piling guilt on the motorist and the manufacturers, who, in all fairness, have been sent down those roads by successive governments keen to reduce CO2 at any cost.
‘For most of the UK, diesel vehicles command a premium price’