As I write, some people are very proud of themselves for letting down the tyres of SUVs parked in urban areas.
I’m no great fan of 4x4s bought for no good reason, but my own Land Rover Land Rover Defender sometimes ends up in town after a day hauling animal feed in the sticks, because there are no trains to get home after work.
Letting down tyres of random SUVs is stupid for this and a number of other reasons, including the inevitability that, at some point, someone kneeling next to a Range Rover Sport with a ‘BO55’ or ‘B16’ numberplate will be discovered by a particularly unsympathetic owner.
But I’m more intrigued as to what defines an SUV. Where does estate become crossover; does crossover become XC; does XC become SUV; does SUV become 4x4? And if these guys know, would they like a job in editing our data section?
THEY KNOW, YOU KNOW. The data. It’s all there. If you buy a new plug-in hybrid Citroën C5 X, it will ping head office every now and again to grass you up about how often you’ve plugged in the car – or haven’t.
It’s all anonymised, they say, and GDPR-compliant. But Citroën CEO Vincent Cobée explains: “We know, based on 200 million kilometres of results, the fuel economy and what we need to influence the number of people charging.”
Your Citroën PHEV will send you reminders if don’t plug it in regularly. “The less often you charge it, the more often you get a reminder,” says Cobée.
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I agree 100% with Matt Prior's proposal for taxing EV drivers on energy used as opposed to the road pricing scheme favoured by the government and the IT industry,
Matt's scheme looks relatively simple and cost-effective to implement and neatly avoids the overbearing surveillance of our everyday lives which road pricing schemes entail. It has the added benefit of incentivising EV drivers to minimise their electricty consumption by driving sensibly. Availabilty of public charging points will remain problematic for a long time , and if EV drivers adjust their driving style to prioritise range and reduce energy consumption, we (and the planet) all benefit.
Road pricing is the IT industry's wet dream. We should resist it at all costs.
A very overwrought method of changing taxation on private vehicles.
Tax on kerbweight, for a start. Heavier cars pay more than lighter ones. Then tax on mileage, which can be easily captured on an annual basis at the time of tax renewal.
So, a BMW iX owner (2.4 tonne car) who racks up 20K miles a year will pay a lot. Someone with a 1.0 litre petrol Kia Picanto who does 5K miles/year will pay far less. The Kia driver will also be paying for fossil fuel, so will be paying tax at the pump for their emissions impact, which the iX owner will avoid. But, crucially, the iX owner won't be paying pennies/zero, as they currently are, whilst wearing out the roads far more than a Kia Picanto.
Tax on kerbweight and mileage.
I have some locking tyre caps on the way, sometimes I need to be somewhere critically for others safety, of course these morons can't know that but I can't risk them delaying me. In fact they don't know anyones business. That shiny Range Rover may belong to a vet and just been through a car wash, the vet needing to get to an emergency, it could belong to the security service trying to stop a terrorist operation... they have no idea.