Drivers could be paid 'up to £2,000 to scrap diesels' - BBC News
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-39620084



That's quite an accusation.

most of the 'bad' air is blown in from the EU. how surprising ...

I think what pisses me off about this is:
1. The Govt was aware that diesel wasn't as clean as it was claimed by car manufacturers. There was a big drive to oush down CO2 emissions.
2. The Govt actively pushed sales of diesel cars through lower fuel duty and lower VED (or "road tax").
3. Diesels were "missold" to customers who thought they'd get better mpg despite doing only city driving. This is what caused problems with DPF being clogged up. Some garages offered to remove the DPF and advertised such services.
4. The Govt essentially did bugger all when VW emissions tests were found to be manipulated. At least in the US there was a lawsuit.
5. Now, instead of taking corrective action to punish car manufacturers, the Govt is punishing the public by allowing cities to put extra charges in diesel cars in an effort to ban them. This is despite city centres heading towards pedestrianisation and allowing only public transport (taxis, buses etc) through. Ignoring the fact that these are diesel engined vehicles.

IMO the push towards renewables/electric vehicles should start with public transport.

i have to agree. maybe the engineering for engines should focus on something like compressed air for fuel. just a thought ...

I have a moral objection to tax payers money being used to fund people's cars like this.

I can see where Levick is coming from but fundamentally the government has a limited number of ways it can affect the behaviour of big lumps of the population. If it wants to stop people doing something, it can either make it illegal or it can make it more expensive via levies and taxation. If it wants to encourage people to do something, pretty much the only options available are tax breaks and/or direct subsidies (like we had previously for zero emission vehicles).

Personally I think if we 're going to have a diesel scrappage scheme, there has to be some fairly strict conditions on what you replace it with to get the cash. Otherwise we'll have idiots with massive diesel Chelsea tractors getting money from UKGov to replace them with massive petrol Chelsea tractors and frankly the gain for the nation in that is marginal at best. Yes, have a scrappage scheme, but only if you replace your diesel car with a car which fits under a pretty serious limit on emissions or in fact is a zero emissions car. Yes, there'll still be rich people being given cash they don't need to replace diesel Panameras with Teslas, but I'll take that if we also end up getting rid of a massive bunch of diesel Mondeos and replacing them with hybrids or some such.

The problem, currently, is that people usually buy a diesel for a good reason - they drive a lot of miles. If they are replacing them with electric (which is the only sensible move, from an environmental standpoint), it won't work.

The Tesla is very expensive, compared to my Nissan, and is probably the only current electric vehicle with a half-way serious range, but it only achieves about a third of the range of the Nissan. In fact, the Nissan would get me to our holiday destination and pretty much all of the way back, without needing to refuel. The Tesla would need at least one complete recharge on the way to the destination.

Electric works, if your daily commute is less than the range of the vehicle (or each leg is less, if you have guaranteed charging possibilities at work). It wouldn't bother me, if I had to plug the car in each night, but if the car adds several hours to a single journey, because it needs to be constantly refuelled, it isn't a suitable replacement.

I am lucky, my new job is right on my doorstep and I could drive an e-auto for nearly a week without recharging, but my last job, I would have had to recharge at the office to guarantee that I could get a Leaf or similar e-auto back home again. On the other hand, the journey was a 83mpg average, with 2 sets of traffic lights and 1 roundabout and flowing traffic, I think in over 5 years of commuting, I had 2 times, where the traffic backed up and I had to wait more than 30 seconds for it to start moving again. Those were ideal conditions for a diesel motor, no suburband or city driving, constant driving at running temperatures for a long period - on such a journey, my Qashqai was getting over 80mpg. My current commute gets between 50 and 58mpg, mainly because the journey is almost over by the time the engine is warm.

Totally agree

We have a diesel (Hyundai mid sized SUV) but SWMBO commutes 30 miles each way to work via country roads – so we do about 15K miles p.a.. There is no re-charging points near where she works and no on site parking so an electric vehicle was when we bought the car not an option.

There is a new Mitsubishi hybrid out now that I would consider and they have just released a plug in version which I understand has a battery range of about 50 miles so she could get to work on battery and some of the way home but of course it costs – our car has 90K miles on it but should be good for another 60K - so about 4 years when SWMBO hope to retire

If the government wants to pay me to replace the car then I would do it otherwise I see no point and will happily drive in into the ground and then replace it when we stop doing such mileage

Good luck converting the ambulance service!

Well obviously, but in fact if you think about it the Ambulance service is a good use case for electric vehicles. Less vibration when travelling, better acceleration when required, plus you can put a whopping big battery in it and run the diagnostic kit & etc. off it as well, much more efficient. whether it's currently practical to do it, and whether there'd ever be the money to are fair questions but there's no real argument that diesel ambulances are inherently better than hybrid/zero emission ones are.

I suspect for emergency vehicles you'd need to have a higher number of them than we have now to allow for charging, especially with the size of battery they'd need. A diesel vehicle can be ready to go pretty much instantly and refuelled in minutes, the same isn't (currently) true of pure electric vehicles. Obviously not a problem for hybrid though.
The other thing to consider is that running out of juice in an all electric vehicle would potentially be much more serious than in a conventional vehicle if there was only one power system because you'd lose all the equipment onboard at the same time as the drive.

Standardized battery packs. One (or more) charging, another in the vehicle. When it needs recharging, you drive over a swap-out bay and the old battery is automatically pulled out and the new battery plugged in. Shouldn't take longer than refuelling a diesel, although obviously a bigger cost, as you need one battery for every vehicle in the fleet, plus a number of reserve batteries...

Problem with that will be the power drain of re-charging all the equipment (there's loads) and the fact that we'd be tied to base. At the moment we can re-fuel on station, but can also stop and use our fuel card if we're out of area, battery replacement would just not work and in rural areas like Norfolk it'd be impractical at best when often we don't see our base station from the start to the (often late) end of shift. Additionally, we'd need to have ambulance fleet assistants for every station which is outside of possibilities at the moment, whereas any crew member can use a diesel pump.

There's also the requirement for re-stocking and re-fuelling other services vehicles when they're out of area, at the moment it's no big deal for an EMAS or LAS ambulance to stop by our base when they've done a patient transfer and re-fuel using our diesel, I can't see the PTB being quite so keen on replacing their batteries or re-charging them so they can get home again. Even like for like there's enough variety between services to make it impossible at the moment certainly.

Bring on the hydrogen cars!

Sadly, that may be one of those fantastic ideas which never catches on. The car industry seems much more interested in hanging around waiting for that mythical battery technology that will run an electric car for 300 miles but recharge in seconds.