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Thinking of a Euro 4 engine car (2008) so as to be ULEZ safe, but wondering if rules will change again. Obviously buying a Euro 5 or 6 would be safer, but adds quite a lot of cost on.
Anyone with any insight into potential rule changes?? Would like to keep the car 10 years!
Cheers
I mentioned this briefly on the other thread, I don't have any inside info but my gut feel is it's not wise.
The regs are only going to get tighter, it's an easy (and IMO good) thing to target to drive up revenues and drive down emissions and other pollution.
Looking at BIK on company cars and the direction of travel of VED I'd expect a significant tightening of clean air, lez and ulez to follow.
Add to that rulings that pollution was to blame in specific cases over recent years and there will be potential increases in financial liability for councils and government for not taking large steps to prevent these deaths in future.
For me, I'd be buying a cheaper newer car, I'd guess you'd pick up a euro 5 or 6 mondeo in place of the euro 4 5 series for similar money.
ULEZ (or the Clean Air Zones that are popping up in various cities) will, at some point, become Congestion Charge zones. Probably not for a while but as engines get cleaner and more hybrid / electric vehicles use the roads, it gets to the point where the air quality is within legal limits and cities aren't making any money from the zones. They're expensive to put in and to run so if AQ is "good" (ie within legal limits) and most of the vehicles within the zone are compliant, there's little point having a CAZ.
At which point you either have to de-install or you have to change the parameters - like turning it into a congestion charging zone or potentially changing the parameters. The latter is difficult to justify if the original aim (improving AQ) has already been met.
It is more complicated than that; there are various caveats within the installation, the grant funding for them and so on but you reach a tipping point eventually where keeping it as a CAZ can't be justified. They're designed as a lever for behaviour change, not a permanent feature. Further down the line you get better results from road filtering (like Low Traffic Neighbourhoods, School Streets etc) and car parking restrictions / charges.
dangeourbrain - thanks and your comment on t'other thread made me think!
crazy legs - interesting re behaviour change shift - thanks
Under a modicum of pressure as our written off car is being taken away Monday ... seems to many variables and choices these days! That said, when we bought our last car 15 years ago, there was an impression that big lumpy diesel (not like modern diesel efficiencies) was a good choice!
there was an impression that big lumpy diesel (not like modern diesel efficiencies) was a good choice!
Ah how times change 😂
I don't disagree with crazylegs but I can't see it happening in the time scale you're looking at (I'd expect the electrics in the car to be a problem much sooner than it not being an electric car)
If I had to guess, I'd say diesel likely to be blanket charged from end 2025 and petrol bumped to euro 5, euro 6 about 2028, then all ice charged in 2030 when sales stop.
Light hybrids probably being lumped with ice.
Congestion charging across the board by 2035.
That said by 2040 we'll by flying cars and living on the moon.
Give or take a bit Petrol engines met the criteria for Euro 6 almost a decade in advance, hence why most zones are Euro 4 for Petrol and Euro 6 for Diesel. E.g. for motorbikes (objectively the highest performance / most marginal engines) you could still make a Euro4 air cooled engine with a carburetor, there are even Euro5 high performance 2-strokes! For most it just meant a re-map to improve combustion efficiency at the expense of ~5% of the power, and a few really antiquated engines had to be dropped.
So there's little or no reason to tighten them, diesels really are the problem in this regard, and Euro5/Euro6 brought in large step changes.
The big change will be Euro7, which will make it VERY difficult to make a small/cheap internal combustion engine powered car. It's basically going to apply a lot of the diesel tech to petrol cars, and further tighten the diesel requirements. Expect anything smaller than a Golf/Focus to probably become Electric only (or become expensive).
That said by 2040 we’ll by flying cars and living on the moon.
I want a jetpack before all that!
I spent enough time crashing one of those on my zx 48 to know a jetpack is way beyond my abilities to survive
Wikipedia would suggest that Euro 5 came about in 2009. Is there that much of a price difference?