Up to £5000 if you buy an electric car!!!!

[225]

So the UK Government is to give up to £5000 to each buyer of an electric car or plug-in hybrid. How kind of them. Or rather how kind of us, who pay the taxes that are being given away like this. It’s great for getting news headlines, but will it have much real effect?
At the moment there are hardy any cars that would qualify. The g-Wiz and Mega eCity aren’t real cars. The Mitsubishi i-MiEV, Smart ED and Mini E aren’t on sale yet. Nor are the plug-in hybrids: the Vauxhall Ampera, a version of the Prius, a Focus, a Golf, and the Fisker.
But the measure doesn’t take effect until 2011, when all those cars should have hit the market. Around that time there will also be other plug-in hybrids. Renault-Nissan pledges to have pure-electric cars on the road by then, and so does Tesla with its Model S saloon.
A subsidy will help, but it certainly won’t cover the cost of upgrading from diesel or petrol to e-power. The Ampera will cost twice the price of the similarly-sized Astra. The Mitsubishi i-MiEV is twice a petrol i. You get the picture. But a five grand bung is better than nothing, and will encourage early-adopters to take the plunge.
At the moment, there’s nowhere much to charge these things. It’s chicken-and-egg: no charge points makes ownership impractical, while no cars makes it uneconomic to build charge points. The subsidy should encourage councils to install more charge points, because they will expect there to be users.
I like the new generation of electric cars. They accelerate fast, and they’re smooth and quiet. For a two-car household, the car that does the short trips could probably be replaced by a pure-electric. And the plug-in hybrids solve the problem of range: if you need to go on a long trip, you don’t have to stop and recharge for hours, because after the batteries run down the petrol engine kicks in.
But I’m always suspicious of a subsidy for a particular type of technology. The idea of this one is to reduce CO2, but why not just give a subsidy to all ultra-low-carbon vehicles? Then if someone invents something better - an ultra-efficient conventional car, or a fuel-cell machine - it would also qualify. Because after all, plug-in hybrids aren’t low carbon when the engine is running. And if the power comes from fossil-fuel electricity they aren’t even zero-carbon when running in electric mode (though they’re lower than a normal car).
And there’s another reason to be suspicious of the subsidy. At the moment in Britain, a litre of petrol costs about 33p - to which you must add 54p duty and 13p VAT, to make £1 a litre that you pay. In other words, the fuel is effectively taxed at 200 percent. Domestic electricity is taxed at 5 percent. So if many of us switched to electric cars, the Treasury would have a colossal hole in its finances. So doubtless a future Chancellor would have to find a way of taxing our electric motoring back to roughly the level it costs in a normal car now.
There’s no free lunch.


Taken from Topgear website

[dowdy]

Will my Sinclair C5 qualify?

[BluFin]

OK I just bought one where do I get the 5k

[1up]

aren't most of our powerstations gas or coal fired , ok maybe slightly greener than the car burning fossil fuel itself but none the less still a fossil fuel????

[andyxs]

i doubt this idea will ever come to fruition its just some more headline grabbing bollox to try n take atention away from the smear stuff. i particularly like the idea of the £2000 minimum srappage thing, telling us its for the environment, i can see a similar idea now (of course to save the environment).

Whilst the car industry waits for the government to decide on a German-style ‘scrappage scheme’ for cars there was good news for Britain’s beleaguered sapling planting businesses this week as ministers announced a new Sawage Programme for old trees. Under the new initiative, anyone with a tree over nine years old will be able to claim £2000 towards the cost of a new sapling if they cut down their old tree, chop it into little pieces and then burn it.

‘This will be a great boost to the tree growers of Britain,’ said David Short-Termism, the minister responsible for introducing the new scheme. ‘As the current economic crisis worsened, this vital industry reacted as best it could by continuing to plant acres and acres of saplings. Unfortunately, demand for these trees has slowed dramatically and now is the time for the government to use your taxes to offset their ineptitude.’

Mr Short-Termism also believes that encouraging people to destroy older, more interesting trees will have a valuable environmental effect and denies that old oaks, horse chestnuts, elms and so on can actually be better for the environment; ‘Old trees are often very dirty with moss and have squirrels living in them. By chopping down such trees and replacing them with a clean new sapling there will be a marked reduction in such factors as the amount of leaves dropped in Autumn and some other tissue thin reasons I haven’t thought of yet’.

The new scheme has been greeted with delight by major tree growers and by the bodies that represent them including the Society of Tree Growers & Planters. ‘This is exactly the sort of flimsy quick fix our industry needs,’ said STGP spokesman Mhike Dhesperation. ‘A brief period of slightly increased tree buying activity will certainly see us through the recession. Assuming of course that the recession only lasts a couple of months and then everyone who’s already chopped down an old tree and bought a new one decides they want to buy another new one. And that’s exactly what’s going to happen isn’t it? Erm…
(Nicked from Sniffpetrol.com)