The most stupid suggestion that is routinely trotted out. How can any idiot government depend on tax revenue from fuel that they do not joe public to use?

If you drive motorists off the road, you will not have any EXTRA cash – in fact the tax revenue DECREASES. Witness current falling tax revenues.

Where will all the subsidies for Public Transport come from then? HIGHER fares and HIGHER Taxes elsewhere.

Blair used to waffle that he would have to cut spending on Schools/Hospitals if we did not pay higher motoring taxes – and was never challenged on the vapiditry of such a statement.

For too long governments of all political hues (under the guise of the “environment”) have used the motorist as a Golden Goose which will keep on laying.

Well they have shot it.

if you offered employers tax incentives to stagger the start of working days from say 7 until 10 am in 15 minute increments randomly instead of having the vast majority of our workforces in inner cities starting at 9 am that would do a tremendous amount of good for emmissions on the congested roads and the over crowding on the trains

easy low tech solutions remain the best !!!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rcBoVgyKjH8

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unsafe_at_Any_Speed

Junk like this is for the birds. Not even cheap when you think how much a quality car would be second hand and how much the Chinese one would loose in depreciation. The Tato Nano is for the third world not advanced countries, and like the G-Wiz beyond the pale. I would rather walk.
The same people who support this race to the bottom will be the same ones calling for the banning of motorbikes as they are ‘dangerous’. Approve of this for nine grand rob? 30+ mpg by the way.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e20G96Bmfd0

The answer efficient car transport will probably lie in ultra efficient engines allowing most of the power to get the the road instead of being lost through the radiator, not hydrogen or hybrid cars like the Honda Prius. How green and fuel efficient is this car in the real world? All that weight and only seventy BHP. Must be slow?

Meanwhile VAT on domestic fuel & power should increase to 17.5% and it should be extended to water & sewage to conserve supplies. Road fuel duties should rise by 8% p/a in real terms with the money ear-marked to finance making the transport system carbon neutral. This means more public subsidy for low emissions providers to expand while all property deals worth under £500,000 should be stamp duty free -rising to £1 million if they meet energy efficient criteria.

Plastic bags ought to face a 10p tax to stop wild-life being harmed to reduce litter and by having fewer of them less CO2 is around. Recycling needs to be ended so that low carbon incinerators ( that smell no worse than bonfires ) can burn all our household rubbish and thus supply 20% of our energy needs ( as they do in Denmark). This means energy security from a safe domestic supply that will not cost a bomb like wind etc and will not be a terrorist target like a nuclear power station.
Councils could just sell our rubbish to the power companies meaning that the Council Tax could be less & services better funded thanks to this new income stream.

Under the last Tory government the fuel duty escalator did produce lower carbon emissions and it could do so again as money does impact on behavior. Landfill tax however has just lead to fly-tipping and more litter as much that is set aside for recycling just gets landfilled anyway. The Landfill Tax should go as it has failed while the Climate Change Levy needs to rise to fund making Capital Allowances not only more generous but very biased towards environmentally sound research & development .

Aviation fuel needs taxing at the same rate as road fuel with the £9 billion raised funding as many essential new roads and high speed rail links as that money can buy. Why do we give the aviation industry such a big subsidy when the money could fund plugging the obvious gaps in our transport infrastructure that past Tory & Labor governments neglected ?

The aim of all this is to ensure that we move to a low carbon economy – the money from the plastic bag charge could fund green regeneration of our deprived inner -cities. We need a responsible policy on car usage that makes the industry greener so that it makes more fuel efficient cars and ensures that rather than just hammering the motorist that car users have the choice of low emission vehicles and a better public transport system.

It does stand to reason that if cars are using less fuel then the higher fuel duty will be less of a problem for motorists – by being green they could pay less in motoring taxation ( less VAT on the car purchase & no VED ) while having better buses , trains and roads too. I think that the right batch of carrots & sticks can revive our economy by getting consumers & business to make green choices ( i.e. fewer people working in the production of plastic bags & more employed in the production of low carbon energy produced from rubbish incineration ). This certainly applies to the car industry.

We have had a lot of creative finance methods for cars for years. Balloon payments, leasing, even equity release schemes. It may not be a bad thing if those creative debt based sales methods are abandoned. I never got it why anyone would want to “rent” their own car.

Eventually people will have to buy cars again. And if that means saving up, the frankly less than massive sums required before buying, then hard though the crash landing is, it is long overdue.

One other point, however, if British and other EU production is geared towards big vehicles, will the public ever want to buy those again when their trust in the government not to retrospectively hike the taxes on them has been shattered?

Perhaps the incoming Conservative administration should bindingly promise that no retrospective taxes will be levied. As well as privatising (the BBC -ed) dismantling the surveillance society, guaranteeing our free speech tradition, etc, etc.

Aren’t they secretly pleased to have collapsed such a major industry ? doesn’t the post-industrial society they boasted of now afford opportunities in counselling, estate agency, and pop music – the new “weightless economy” ?

Surely the recycling of cars by buying second-hand and patching and mending is more energy-efficient and less wasteful of capital ? Treating cars as consumer-goods rather than producer-goods has been a curse; how many bankers were getting new company cars every year as they changed jobs ?

But, while the global market may shift to high volume, more basic cars, why will any be built here? The reason western manufacturing have shifted to the luxury end is because that’s where our competitive advantages are; engineering and technology. For cheap, simple cars; you need cheap workers. Even better if these cheap workers are in the country’s you intend to sell most of the cars.

UK engineers may help on some of the design; though given the number of graduates in China and India, I’m not sure. But we’re not going to make many.

The UK is going to have to find other things its good at doing apart from finance. I don’t think its cars.

With Western wage levels being much higher than those in the developing world, it will always be near impossible to compete on price with cheap cars made in the Far East. So why not concentrate on what we do best – the other end of the market?

Land Rover’s fastest growing markets are Russia and China, and Russia is their third biggest market, closing fast on the second biggest (the US). So it simply is not the case that people in developing countries only want cheap cars. Wealthy people everywhere in the world want great top of the range cars, and there is nothing wrong with making a living selling them to those people!