GRR

OPINION: Taxation should favour lighter cars

28th January 2025
Adam Wilkins

I defy anyone to tell me, without looking it up, exactly how road tax – or, more accurately, Vehicle Excise Duty – is charged. It’s a chaotic tangle, the final bill taking into consideration the age of the vehicle which sometimes means higher emissions cost a fortune and sometimes they don’t. Diesel cars are punished with punitive charges apart from the occasions when they aren’t and EVs go free – for now.

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There are also colossal first-year fees applicable to some cars, while the luxury car premium applies to cars with list prices of more than £45,000 and is still charged even if you negotiate a deal that brings the price you pay below that threshold. Cars with a list price below that water line are also subject to the premium if you buy enough options to tip them over £45,000 – because of course they are. You can save a bit by paying for a year up front rather than monthly, or get free road tax by driving a car more than 40 years old – but only if you’ve filled out the right paperwork. Another way to save is by rolling a six at your local Post Office counter. Someone in the pub told me that last bit and I haven’t yet checked whether it’s true.

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It’s essentially a complicated set of exceptions and incentives that has been added to and taken away from depending upon which direction political will was blowing at any given time. Diesels-are-good-oh-no-diesels-are-bad is probably the most notable bit of governmental indecision in recent years, but layered on top of that is now the always-inevitable removal of the EV incentive.

It needs wiping clean and starting again, but that will always result in winners and losers. Any wholesale change to the way cars are taxed will of course mean that some car owners will come out better off and some worse. There are all manner of ways in which we could be charged for driving our cars, and one that constantly bubbles around is road pricing. There is an argument to say that paying per mile is the fairest way to be billed for road usage. As someone who always has more than one valid tax disc (figuratively speaking, physical paper circles disappeared more than a decade ago), this idea has some appeal. 

But only some. I don’t really like the idea that we could be charged variable rates for driving on busier roads and more popular times of day. Yes, we all have some agency over how much we drive, but we often have obligations that leave us with no option as to when and where. Besides, we’re already charged by the mile in the form of fuel taxation (and let’s not forget that the fuel duty itself is subject to VAT...).

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There is another way: tax cars by the amount they weigh. Nick Molden, CEO of Emissions Analytics, a company he founded to measure real-world emissions of road cars and Felix Leach, an Associate Professor of Engineering Science at the University of Oxford have written a book titled Critical Mass: The Only Thing You Need to Know About Green Cars.

Their studies conclude that, regardless of the method of propulsion a given car uses, it’s the weight of the vehicle that is consistently the most accurate indicator of its environmental impact. Heavier cars require more raw material to build, require wear out larger consumables such as tyres and brake pads and wear them out more quickly, and are harder to dispose of at the end of their life. The crux is this: an efficient petrol car is greener than a big EV, and therefore it’s only fair that VED reflects that to encourage consumers to make more environmentally friendly choices.

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The other side of this is that it gives engineers an incentive to make genuine improvements to how ‘clean’ a car is. Just installing a big, heavy battery pack and saying, ‘Hey presto, no tailpipe emissions!’ is not the simple solution to the problem. And modern cars don’t actually have to be heavy despite all the crash protection and systems required. Take the Dacia Duster, a large SUV capable of ferrying a family and all their gear wherever they need to go. It weighs less than a Lotus Emira. The seven-seat Jogger is only 100kg heavier than that paragon of lightweighting, the Alpine A110. So nobody is suggesting you’ll need to endure a Citroën Ami to keep the kilos in check.

Reducing the weight of a car is nothing but a virtuous circle. As well as reducing the resources required to create the car in the first place, it means that everything else can be reduced, too: fuel usage (whether that’s stored in a battery or as liquid in a tank), brakes, tyres, suspension components can all be more delicate while achieving the same result. Lighter cars create less damage when they crash, too, and smaller cars create more space on the road.

Will we see the UK government implement Leach and Molden’s findings? There’s nothing on the agenda at the moment, but France and Norway have begun penalising heavier cars. Incentivising people to drive lighter cars would get my vote.

Main image courtesy of Getty Images.

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