Motoring Alan Judd
COVERAGE of the VW group emissions fiddle may have breached popular boredom levels but it rumbles on because journalists need copy and lawyers get more money. Meanwhile, my friend on the shop floor tells me that when certain VW diesels are presented for their MOT emissions assessment they cannot be revved while stationary above 2000rpm, which means more favourable readings than they would get at full revs.
The EU itself is partly to blame because it decreed testing regimes unrelated to real-world driving. Fuel consumption figures, for example, are achieved by bench-testing engines in laboratory conditions with manufacturers recalibrating to get the best readings. Intended to ensure conformity of test conditions so that cars could be compared with each other, no one pretended they reflected reality. But it encouraged a culture under which it was acceptable to prepare vehicles for testing, with reality left to the punters to discover for themselves. (Ditto 0–62mph times: test cars are tuned and lightened to get those chassis-bending figures – seats stripped out etc – and you’re unlikely to get anywhere near them yourself.) VW’S fiddle was part of that culture, taken a step or two farther. For a guide to realworld consumption figures, try Honest John, the Telegraph’s motoring agony aunt: go to www.honestjohn.co.uk and click on real mpg.
Then, of course, came all the talk about penalising the eleven million diesel drivers governments have encouraged over the past fourteen years through alleged ‘tax breaks’ on vehicle excise duty. They’re nothing of the sort, of course, merely a consequence of taxing cars according to CO2 emissions. That system is due to change in April 2017 in ways that – true to form for the DVLA – are already causing confusion. From that date if you buy a new eco-friendly car on which you currently pay little or no tax, you’ll pay much more. This is because the system has been so successful in encouraging cleaner cars that by then 75 per cent of all new cars sold will be in Band A, meaning (according to current tests) they emit 100g/km or less CO2 and pay no tax. The Government therefore needs to recoup anticipated tax losses. But if you buy your eco-friendly car before April 2017 you’ll continue paying little or no tax – the new rules will not be retrospective.
So far so good, but it’s not that simple. If after April 2017 you buy an eco-unfriendly gas-guzzler for less than £40,000 you will actually pay less tax. It won’t feel like it at first because you’ll pay much more for the first year but after that rates will drop markedly. Thus, the longer you keep your gas-guzzler the lower your average annual tax bill. But if you buy an eco-friendly car costing more than £40,000 it will be subject to an additional levy of £310 from the second to the sixth year, after which it will drop significantly. If it’s a gas-guzzler, of course, you’d be better off buying it when it’s a year old.
Confused? You’re not alone. It’s tempting to think that only the DVLA could come up with such a scheme. This is, after all, the body that has just made buying and selling second-hand cars more complicated and costly and which now advises anyone hiring a car abroad to obtain an online code, using their National Insurance number. And if those emissions figures turn out never to have been as claimed, doesn’t this drive a coach and horses through current and future tax regimes? Meanwhile, the cheapest option is to buy your ecofriendly car before 1 April 2017 and keep it as long as you can. Unless we all go back to coaches and horses.