OT: Car Tax

They could get round that by still requiring you to re-register every year like the present requirements for a zero rated vehicle. Then after a few years they'd introduce a small 'administration' fee which over a few more years would increase to a few hunderd pounds again.

Never let it be said that faceless bureaucrats have ever let any opportunity slip from extracting more money from you to pay their wages.

Plod only cares about taking the knee and ripping you off for as many victimless crimes as the state will give him easy powers to enforce. If you get stopped and you don't have any of insurance tax or MOT you will get fined.

LOL! typical art student use of the word 'ought' to define an ideal that is in practice totally unattainable. Like the spanish solar farms that generated subsidised electricity at midnight using diesel generators, nothing would be easier than switching the house over to a plug into the 'BEV' socket...

or hire a car transporter

Oh, that wont need MOT, just tax and insurance and the tax may even be void as well

Exactly, Electrons from the grid cannot be counted except that the end point. Only practical way to do it is a pay per tonne-mile tax on *all* vehicles. Given modern odometers that is actually feasible. Low mileage cars would pay heaps ;less, making pensioners happy, and high mileage company cars would simply cause the companies to up their prices or stop sending reps out on the roads altogether.

And a less stupid thing is that a garage that has failed your car on an MOT CANNOT keep it and refuse to release it if it has an existing current MOT.

Despite telling you that its 'unsafe to drive' .

Buraeaucratic nonsense is the rule, not the exception

OT: Many years ago I worked in a company part of whose marketing was to give postable tear off 'I am interested in your products' things that you put a stamp on and posted in, where they were delivered to the receptionist, an attractive but not especially bright blonde, who as it later transpired was having a torrid affair with a fellow engineer who was engaged to someone else entirely.

Followers of soaps on TV will predict the outcome with unerring accuracy. Emotional scenes, confrontations, the blonde left, the bloke married the fiancée, and the receptionists desk was found to be full of the last 6 months of unprocessed 'I am interested in your products' mail...

Never underestimate the power of sexual hormones to disrupt a commercial and industrial process..

Enough ANPR cameras and they can charge you on a per mile basis

If it's running on its own wheels it needs to be insured and, I believe, taxed. You have to lift it onto a trailer to be able to transport an uninsured/untaxed vehicle.

I’ve just traded in a hybrid and the new one is also a hybrid. I’m no tree hugger but I really find they work for us. It is a pity we couldn’t get a small / light one for Senior Management - her car doubles as the car we tow on a trailer.

I’m hoping both last long enough for ( ideally) the no fossil fuel nonsense to be scrapped or EV to be practical. They have 10 year warranties, provided we have them serviced by Toyota.

I also have an account but I didn’t realise we got a discount, I have for convenience.

All this ULEZ business is a nonsense. We have Crit Aires for the Aygo and MH, about £5 each, for anywhere that needs them in France. We were in Germany a few weeks back, we got the German equivalents. About £4 each, valid anywhere in Germany that needs them ( and I understand Spain ?) You just go into the equivalent of an MOT station, show your reg document, and they give you one for 5 euro ( about £4). Our German is limited but we just produced the V5 and he knew what we wanted - my efforts with Google translate weren’t needed 😊

Meanwhile, Khan is ripping people off every day.

As for parking. ….

We were also in Luxembourg. We parked at a local station and spent ages looking for somewhere to pay. (We knew the trains were free - yes no fares and not just for us oldies.) Eventually, a chap in a uniform arrived and parked next to us. It turned out he worked for the train company. He couldn’t believe my face when he said all parking a station carparks was free.

Free Parking in France is quite common, especially around midday, to encourage business. Town centres thrive, as do their out of town shopping centres.

We paid in Germany but it wasn’t expensive compared to here, again to encourage business in the tourist areas.

As for the roads - other than Belgium - don’t get me started.

I’m a firm Leaver but we could learn a lot from Europe.

Yes, yet another stupidity, considering a towed car as different from a trailer, which requires no MOT, tax or insurance.

For me, three things need to happen before I will consider an EV (as opposed to a PHEV):

- price needs to come down dramatically so an EV version of (for example) a Ford Focus is similar to that for a petrol/diesel one

- recharging time needs to reduce to comparable levels for petrol or diesel: when I can restore 700 miles range in less than 5 minutes, as I can with my diesel car, I'll be happy; until then, I'd be progressing backwards

- ideally, range needs to increase so you can choose where you recharge (eg at home where it is cheaper than in a supermarket or service station car-park), without having to make unplanned and unwanted stops when your car is getting low

There is also the social problem of paying for your electricity when you go to visit friends/family: either you use their electricity and have to pay for it, or you find an on-street charger and then leave your car some distance from the house that you are visiting.

We've got too used to not having to worry about when/where to fill up, because with an IC car, you can always find a garage and you can always fill up within a few minutes. Having to plan ahead and think "where will I recharge that won't keep me hanging around (*) - will I be able to find a vacant charging station?" is a *huge* step back into the dark ages.

EVs are an excellent idea, once the big problem with the recharge time has been cracked.

(*) Where was I going to stop anyway, where I'll be doing something that I'd planned to do, rather than sitting twiddling my thumbs waiting for the car to "fill up"?

Lets assume 50mpg and see where that gets us.

That's 7644 kWh per hour, or 7.6MW. So you want to be connecting a cable to your car that can deliver 7.6MW. Thats 1000 amps at 7.6kV. You'd feel safe connecting that to your car, would you? Would you trust the little old dear to do it?

And that's only one car at one "filling" station.

And lets hope that the charging efficiency is at least 99.99%. Even then you're losing 750 watts of energy which will be dissipated as heat somewhere in your car. Hope you can get rid of that without the car catching fire.

You can't avoid the plain physics of the situation, and if you do the sums, as above, you see what you're up against.

And after a 100 years it has not been. Some of the first cars were electric, but guess why they went out of fashion.

Nothing beats a tank of diesel of similar for energy storage.

And you will understand why electric cars never caught on

That's why I maintain we need to have a set of battery standards where the battery is slung underneath the car and can be swapped in minutes.