Well, they’d better get a fuckin’ move on…
Diesel cars should be banned already.
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Sure, an electric car might be way more efficient than an internal combustion one if you just consider the vehicle. But a fossil fuel power station isn’t significantly more efficient than an internal combustion engine and we should properly include the power station on the electric car’s side of the equation. We should also include the energy invested in all that refined metal in the national grid, and the effort put into maintaining and operating it. Perhaps the electric vehicles win when the power stations burn gas (which just comes out of the ground) but the internal combustion engines burn petrol or diesel (which has to be refined somewhere in an inherently thermal process) ?
Long story short: a) you have to be very careful to cover absolutely everything, including (very difficult) the effects on shared-use subsystems (e.g. the national grid), when you consider the efficiency impact of choosing one option over another and b) it still isn’t clear that efficiency matters as much as climate and pollution and future-proofing.
VB
There’s also all the petrol/diesel infrastructure as well - petrol stations, extracting the fuel, transporting it etc. I agree there’s loads to consider.
There was a Tesla that was imported into Singapore, and the owner was initially levied with quite a high emissions tax, because the customs person worked out the emissions from generating the electricity, and charged on that basis. It got reduced to zero later.
Sounds perfectly fair to charge for the emissions based on generating the electricity in the first place.
Only if you also include the additional charge for petrol extraction and infrastructure
Agreed. But petrol/diesel are also taxed.
No way electric cars should be zero.
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Unless the leccy is truly clean.
VB
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Yes.
I think that the problem is that it’s never clear what a tax is about. There is loads of tax on motor fuel, and various reasons for this - global warming, incentivise public transport, local air quality etc. The real reason is that it’s easy to tax, and brings in lots of money. In the absence of a rationale underpinning the tax, you can’t really argue for how much something else should be taxed.
However, the removal of polluting cars from city centres is obviously a good thing, and it should be incentivised through tax benefits.
No doubt a lot of the tax raised from petrol and diesel goes into maintaining the infrastructure (or not if the state of our roads are anything to go by). They will have no choice to tax EVs in a different way once the uptake is significant, even if we all have mini wind turbines at home. Probably an electronic toll type system based on distance covered.
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Not really - there is tax income, and public expenditure. It’s rare that any income is specifically for a particular expense.
So there will indeed be a hole in the public finances if a major income element is reduced, but this happens all the time, and they will rejig things - probably in some unfair and arbitrary way!
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To give you some scale of the electricity generation problem, I read today that it would need 50 more Nuclear power stations and 2 more Sellafields (to reprocess the spent fuel), to cope. So that is 50 x £13B + 2 x £30B.
This won’t happen, so I bet incentives for using fuel cells at home.
Li supplies will get difficult in 30 years time, as well as the widespread polution extraction causes to the water systems.
There will need to be large scale Li battery re-processing plants. What will we do with all the petrol stations?
The inland revenue will have a massive black hole from all the fuel taxes, so expect to be taxed in another way, probably new car tax and some sort of annual tax increase.
They should tax electric cars. 
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By the way I’ve decided to buy a Nissan Leaf, but only once the Mazda is sufficiently decrepit. If that’s more than 3-4 years then there will be other options, but I’ll be going full electric and hiring a large car as required.
Moving to a position where you help create demand for two cars to exist instead of one isnt exactly green.
The IFS, back in 2012 recommended road pricing as a way to raise tax from all vehicles regardless of power source higher rates in congested areas and peak times / lower rates in rural parts of the cuntry. This will happen, just a matter of time.