Quote:
Originally Posted by GT6
In the uk sales of diesel cars are now almost 50% but now below petrol, however larger cars are still almost all diesels so they are going to be around for a while yet, for small city cars petrol seems to be making a big comeback but new cleaner diesels will i think still be the choice for larger executive cars and the long distance rep mobiles.
|
Bingo. Whilst diesel says have dipped, they still make up a half of the countries vehicles. Half. It's fine to say they've dropped by a third, but that is a wonderful stat with absolutely no frame of reference to fit it into. A third could still be larger than petrol, so at that point diesel isn't dead and certainly won't be soon.
It's also fine mentioning Germany or even the EU. Very good, except for this is even bigger news in Germany because of the companies involved, and in case you haven't noticed, the EU won't be putting any new laws through the UK any time soon.
It's also incredibly short sighted to suggest that diesel will die given that petrol isn't capable of doing the jobs that a large portion of the diesel vehicles do. Ford doesn't even offer a petrol version of the Transit van, and VW, the company involved in this the most, doesn't offer a petrol version of the VW Transporter Panel van. There's an obvious reason why too - because to get the required torque and power from a petrol engine to move these vehicles, you need huge petrol engines. With that you reduce efficiency and, (and this is the fun bit), massively increase emissions. So you're going to switch all of these diesel vehicles to petrol and think it will reduce emissions with the huge engines that are required? I don't think so. And you are going to ban diesel vehicles from cities? How do you propose goods enter the city? Until we perfect teleportation, that is always going to need a van. And what about those people carriers, which are essentially just vans with windows? My partners mother has one with a petrol engine. This is a brand new Ford, with supposedly a great engine in a small sized people carrier. It does an absolutely awful 35mpg. So the solution of moving it to a petrol engine has increased fuel usage by around 80-100%.
Suddenly this petrol idea doesn't seem very good once you start talking about anything bigger than a Ford Focus.
So lets talk about tax. Want to kill businesses during an already tough financial period? Tax them to all hell. Lets assume you aren't talking about a tax on the vehicle, because in the UK that isn't what's happening. The brand new UK Tax laws (which haven't even started yet) will be a flat £140 tax a year for a car - that's if it's a Ford Mustang, or a Ford Fiesta. First year is emissions based, but the rest of the cars life is £140. So a diesel car will not be getting a higher tax than a petrol car, and even then, tax laws in the UK were based on CO2 emissions, not NOx, which was the problem with the diesels.
So lets say you tax the fuel. In the UK, only agricultural use gets tax free diesels. It's coloured red for identification (hence the nickname red diesel). Businesses can claim VAT back on fuel costs, but not the fuel duty I believe. So if you increase the fuel tax, you end up hurting businesses more than anything else. So those businesses all change to petrol engines, and end up producing even more emissions from the massive engines required.
Diesel is not going away in the next few years. It's not going to die, it's not bad technology, and it's not going to be replaced by petrol. Look at the entire system as a whole as to why this simply is not going to happen in 10 years.
Diesel is more likely to be replaced by electric vehicles. With companies like Tesla now forcing traditional manufacturers to invest in the technology, we'll be seeing large jumps in performance (in all areas) of that in the next 10 years. And electric will provide the power and torque required for the goods vehicles.
We're getting way off topic now, but the end result is this: Diesel is unmarketable at the moment due to the scandal. That means we won't see diesel racing cars for a long time, if ever. However it is a requirement for a LOT of every day vehicles that simply won't work properly or efficiently with a petrol engine. Small cars were already making the transition to petrol (Fords 1L Ecoboost Fiesta is amazing), but there's a very good reason that anything as large as a saloon and larger tends to be a diesel. And that fact cannot be ignored, as it may make the situation even worse.