When are you going fully electric?

Soldato
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But people who use a premier inn can’t afford a EV unless it’s their company car scheme giving them one. In any case they are able to claim all business expenses do not sure why they would bother when they can claim costs and time for sitting in a charger.

These Car schemes subsided by tax cuts of course …. Discuss
The demographic at a Premier Inn is pretty wide. Even Mr Money Bags can't be bothered booking a boutique hotel for a one night stop over.

I'm in a pretty standard customer support type role and as such I'm salaried, not on the clock. I have contracted hours but generally it is a quid pro quo when it comes to hours worked. Therefore if I can start the day with a full tank and bomb it straight back home after I finish my days work I get home at a reasonable time. If I spend 30 minutes charging the car, I miss 30 minutes with the family that night. It's as simple as that really.

Also, like many people with a company car that has a high percentage of personal use, I pay for my fuel and claim back at HMRC advisory rates. At the moment, for EVs, these are heavily biased towards domestic rates. Therefore public charging would cost me circa 7ppm which is a bit crazy. If however it was lumped into my hotel bill as, for example, a charging fee of X plus a per kWh rate that was similar to domestic rates I could claim it all back at cost.

I know I'm only looking at my own use here but for me destination charging is an essential before I can make the switch.

Edit - Honestly though, by the time the infrastructure suits my needs there will be no financial benefit for an EV over an ICE so the swap will probably be more dictated by car availability, or forced by excessive BIK loading on ICE vehicles to meet the government's narrative for 2030.
 
Associate
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They can when all the EVSEs getting installed are connected to the internet ;)

This would never work for taxing “car electricity”. For example mine is connected to the internet but I can disconnect it in 5 seconds. Also can charge from any 3pin socket. Many people use their own solar to charge.

Road pricing is the only fair way to do it.
 
Soldato
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Road pricing is the only fair way to do it.
Or a flat(ish) rate of VED that is just much higher than it is now. Weight the charge against the efficiency and list price of the car. That would be far simpler to administer and have a much lower cost of collection, the DVLA are already set up to collect the tax via direct debit.

I think when I did a crude total fuel duty/number of cars on the road it came to about £800 each a year.

That said car owners shouldn’t be picking up all of the fuel duty tab, the commercial vehicle sector chunders though diesel like no tomorrow and pays a huge chunk of the fuel duty collected, they still need to pay their fair share.

The actual amount will be far lower and you could price your average Range Rover at 4-5x a modest hatch, likewise it will have the effect of getting unnecessary second, third, fourth cars off the road that people just don’t need but have because they can.
 
Soldato
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But liquid fuel is significantly cheaper than grid sourced electricity. The only reason EVs are cheaper to run is the lack of fuel duty

You could also argue that the ‘true cost’ of liquid fuels is far greater because of the damage it does to the local and global environment which is mainly ignored.
 
Caporegime
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You could also argue that the ‘true cost’ of liquid fuels is far greater because of the damage it does to the local and global environment which is mainly ignored.
You could argue the same about raw materials for battery production too.

Will be interesting what happens with missing fuel duty once EV hits a critical number. Same for BIK
 
Soldato
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You could argue the same about raw materials for battery production too.

Will be interesting what happens with missing fuel duty once EV hits a critical number. Same for BIK
Mileage based road pricing will replace fuel duty eventually

I do think banging on about true cost is missing the point a bit though. We simply can’t afford to do the cheapest thing because the world ecosystem will collapse. We need to change and net zero isn’t going to be costless but we still need to do it
 
Soldato
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I agree it'll be mileage-based taxation soon, weighted by emissions and vehicle mass.

EVs work heavily in my favour in fuel cost as I do mostly local commuting/journeys, so where that would have (and did) kill economy in an ICE car, it's working wonders in my EV. Based on what my Focus was doing and the local fuel price for unleaded, I'd have to be paying 106p/kWh to match what the fuel cost would have been, which even at the high unit cost at my in-laws while I'm here temporarily (31p), the Focus would still cost 3.4x more to run based on fuel costs alone. Once we move and get on Octopus Go, that cost difference would be 14.2x higher based on getting cheap overnight cost of 7.5p/kWh.
 
Associate
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ttst
Mileage based road pricing will replace fuel duty eventually

I do think banging on about true cost is missing the point a bit though. We simply can’t afford to do the cheapest thing because the world ecosystem will collapse. We need to change and net zero isn’t going to be costless but we still need to do it

Completely agree - the actual point here is the massive CO2 reduction whilst still being able to enjoy amazing cars. Today that's at least 4x less CO2 over the life of the vehicle including manufacturing and recycling, improving as the CO2 intensity of the grid decreases. The fact that they are cheaper to run now counteracts the slightly higher purchase price. It won't be long before the purchase price is equal to ICE and the running costs will probably be similar with road pricing being introduced.

I really hope taxation is mileage-based and not fixed price as that is much fairer. The situation a few years ago when my big diesel doing 20k a year paid £30 while my wife's mini doing 6k a year paid £120 was definitely not right.

The price of fossil fuels is still artificially cheap - if their true carbon cost was included they would be even higher than they are today.

That said, even without any duty or taxes, a kilowatt of wind power or solar power is far cheaper than a kilowatt of petrol and the gap is only going to get larger.
 
Soldato
Joined
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Will be interesting what happens with missing fuel duty once EV hits a critical number. Same for BIK
maybe bev's already record kwhrs fuelling ? if so, that permits an analogue of fuel duty;
with that or mileage based, plus the bev's efficiency/wltp you can calculate a bill.
ideally the chancellor wants the tax at pos though to avoid fraud/clocking/stolen issues;
maybe you declare kwhrs monthly via the web and the bill arrives, in addition to an annual official check

how resilient are bev's to clocking - the 64K$ question
 
Soldato
Joined
13 Jan 2004
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20,946
But people who use a premier inn can’t afford a EV unless it’s their company car scheme giving them one. In any case they are able to claim all business expenses do not sure why they would bother when they can claim costs and time for sitting in a charger.

These Car schemes subsided by tax cuts of course …. Discuss
What?

I own an EV. I almost exclusively use Premier Inns when transiting. Not too expensive and you know what you are getting. It's somewhere to sleep and shower, what more do you need?
 
Soldato
Joined
29 May 2012
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4,280
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Glasgow
But people who use a premier inn can’t afford a EV unless it’s their company car scheme giving them one. In any case they are able to claim all business expenses do not sure why they would bother when they can claim costs and time for sitting in a charger.

These Car schemes subsided by tax cuts of course …. Discuss
People use Premier inns because its cheap and most of the time fairly handy. It's not about not being able to afford a more expensive hotel. But convenience in reality. Its only a bed for the night when travelling for most folk.
 
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