Petrol v diesel

[johnmacdonald]

Read in the press today that used prices of petrol cars has increased by up to 11.7%, whereas diesels have fallen by an average of 5%. But will this have any effect on our thirsty flat fours?

[ccrien]

Short answer, my opinion: it's more to do with sheepish general public fear ( that may or may not come to pass) that diesels will be taxed off the roads and banned from cities.  Since our flat four petrols are already relatively highly taxed and most folks who want one already pay the inflated road tax, I doubt we will see any change in value of these because of this trend.     Subaru buyers and owners don't generally follow the overall trend! 

[ScoobieFloz]

It will be interesting to see what happens to fuel prices as people begin to ditch the ‘dirty diesel’

[billyray]

I went to a presentation by Sustrans this week entitled "Should cars be priced out of london" - deliberately provocative, really turned out to be a promo event for the Wolfson economic prize winning scheme to introduce a form a road pricing (I think development is now being funded by the government). The guy, Gergely Raccuja, who developed it presented it and it's basically the Aviva insurance app on steroids. The get rid of road tax, congestion charge and low emission charge and its all done through a tracker in your car with road usage charges processed through your insurance. This means that diesels are unlikely to be banned, but may have higher "road pricing" depending on where you're driving it. What's really driving the whole initiative is that cars are so much more efficient that even though we have 40% odd more cars on the road since 2000 revenue from fuel duty and car tax has gone down...  Could work and hopefully means that people who bought diesels won't have to worry for too much, the only worrying thing for us Scooby drivers is whether the insurance companies profile our driving on G-force  !!