by Alan B wrote:It isn't just increasing car tax or the price of fuel, some towns are trying to introduce higher parking fees for diesel owners. That is just a money grabbing exercise with the money serving no other purpose than filling the local coffers.
Governments LOVE doing that...
Many years back...in the 1990's...LP Gas used to be a dirt cheap fuel source for cars. At the time LPG was only a fraction the price of petrol...when petrol reached a dollar a liter, LPG was only around 20 cents, if that. Mostly taxis used it because it was so cheap, but some car owners did too, with "dual fuel" systems. The problem was that unless you went all out and rebuilt your engine to be a dedicated LPG engine...hardened valve seats, much higher compression, LPG specific camshaft, etc...then your car would get dramatically worse fuel economy when running on LPG compared to petrol. This was more than offset by the super cheap price of LPG compared to petrol.
Then the government...ostensibly for environmental reasons...decided to encourage people to put LPG systems in their family cars, giving up to $2000 grants to fit it. We looked at it ourselves but decided not to. Plenty of people did though, all over the country. The take up was massive.
Then once numbers of LPG cars rose dramatically, guess what happened?
The LPG fuel, which previously had not had a fuel tax...sorry, "excise"...on it, suddenly had a tax whacked on, and now we have a situation where LPG is so close to the price of petrol that it's no longer economically viable to fit it. Taxis are mostly going to either diesel cars or hybrids.
That's what happens when a government sees something it cannot resist...a captive audience to tax into submission.
Now we have state governments trying to bring in an ethanol-blend mandate to force people to use ethanol blend fuel, despite the fact old cars...and a lot of newer ones...cannot run on the stuff, and the fact it makes your car get worse fuel economy. Which is better for the environment. Somehow.
Ethanol blend fuel is also heavily subsidized by the government, and is cheaper than normal unleaded fuel. And they're trying to either convince or force everyone to use it.
Everyone knows what will happen once the tipping point is reached and a majority of drivers are forced to use it. The subsidies will vanish, fuel excise will be added to bring it into parity with unleaded, and the price will rise. We're not stupid.
Diesel is a great fuel...efficient, powerful, easily manufactured. The emissions are easily controlled as well, but really owners are more concerned with fuel economy than whatever the emissions figures are...people don't care. Is it powerful and economical? Fine...give it to me. Who cares about anything else. We have two cars on the road now...a 2011 Mitsubishi Triton 4x4 twin cab, and a 1982 Toyota Celica with five speed manual. On the highway and even around town, the big two tonne turbo diesel automatic 4x4 gets way better economy than the light weight 2 liter petrol engined 5 speed Celica. How is that not better for the environment?
