Taxing the Petrolheads

It’s all change for VED (Vehicle Excise Duty – otherwise known as Road Tax) from next April when you could find yourself paying as much as £2,310 road tax on your new car in the first year of ownership.

The revised road tax rates are expected to raise a whopping £1.4bn for the chancellor’s coffers by 2020/21 and are supposedly designed to encourage the purchase of low-emission vehicles.

Any new car with CO2 emissions over 255g/km – and let’s be honest this covers a lot of decent cars from the Audi R8 to the Porsche Cayenne and 911 – will be hit with this penal rate of road tax in the first year after 1^st April 2017.

In addition, cars costing £40,000 or more will have a £310 road tax supplement added in each of the 5 years after registration, irrespective of the CO2 emissions. This means that for the first time the all electric Tesla S (which registers 0 on the CO2 emission scale) will attract a £310 road tax charge, not exactly an incentive to purchase one!

In fairness to those in the 1-50g/km CO2 emission bracket – and this includes the whizzy hybrid Kia Optima amongst other high octane motors – will only have to pay £10 in the first year, although this rises to the new  ‘standard rate’ of £140 in each subsequent year.

For more information on the new VED’s visit the HMRC website at www.gov.uk/government/publications/vehicle-excise-duty or contact Paul Windsor for a good old moan about the taxation of drivers!