I believe company cars account for less than 900k cars out of about 32 million in the UK.
The RAC claim 59% in 2019. Although more searching suggests you’re right.
Either way I guess your neighbour crunched the numbers and concluded it was worthwhile.
The most I’ve ever spent on a car was equivalent to about £16k in today’s money - but then I can’t afford and refuse to waste money on new, only buying secondhand. New value has been up to about £40k in today’s money. I’ve never had a company car. I don’t commute to work by car (cycling instead), but the sort of car journeys I do are are either 40 miles or less in a day (most frequent), or 120-150 (next most frequent), or 300-400 sometimes more (maybe once a year - which can be several days in a short space of time).
It sounds like you almost don’t even need the expense/hassle of owning a car! That would be great.
For most, the actual cost of a car is irrelevant as most seem to lease or PCP, which requires a lot less money up front and just monthly payments.
An area where German brands excell as it’s easy to drive a brand new car for £300/month. Much more palatable than putting £16k down on a used car, although the fact that you own your car is a big difference (and a positive one).
All fair points. I largely agree. Before getting the ev, they were all areas of concern for me. If you want or need to drive 300 or 400 miles without taking a break, and regularly run out of gas and need to fill a can with petrol (does that ever happen really?) then electric’s not for you.
You do need to plan a bit more carefully with EV’s, it’s certainly not as care free as petrol, that said I’m sure for most people it’s completely fine.
It is early days, and it is less convenient, but is it not also worth remembering why we’re doing it all in the first place.
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If only! But for the things they do cars are invaluable. My proposal of readily bookable (pay on demand) autonomous vehicles of course covered this - though we must all forget any pleasure from driving. No-one should need to commute to work by car: a combination of cycle, public transport, living nearer work or working from home should cover the vast majority - yes, lifestyle changes and serious public commitment but that is needed.
Not among people I know. There is a whole world of secondhand car ownership out there, which I believe is bigger than the new car owning sector…
Ignoring fuel, my and my wife’s cost of car ownership over tge decades has been somewhat less than that (normalised to today’s money, even for reasonable quality cars (including Audi TT TT turbo, Toyota Verso diesel turbo, Audi A6, Saab 9000 turbo, Citroen CX diesel turbo).
Indeed, and I support the notion up to a point - just some way to go before being practicable and affordable for the majority. But as I said, only up to a point: really we need to get out of the habit of personal motorised transport being the norm, though like others I can think of 1001 reasons why I prefer it.
I just go by figures reported in the press about the rise of PCP, which seems to be huge business (although not just for new cars).
Of course we need a balance of both otherwise there is no used car market. Interestingly, covid has caused a shortage of used cars as home working seems to have reduced demand for new cars. I guess there’s not much point in having a brand new car sat on the drive. This seems to have pushed used cars up in value, for certain marques anyway, although I’ve read this may also be due to cash being worth less currently. I’m no economist so not sure about that.
I’ve done a mix of new and used purchases. £300/month is a fair amount of money but I guess of you like driving it’s an easy way to drive a car that you might not have the cash to buy outright, or tie up liquidity.
They’d benefit even more if they walked/scootered/cycled.
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Oh definitely. We made a point of it with our kids but trying to convince people is hard work. We even have some schools here that have closed off roads to discourage cars but they just park further out!
It’s fair enough if you don’t live locally but a lot of families live well within walking/cycling distance.
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There have just been some very successful safe school streets trial here. They took the simple step of blocking off the main drop-off street to drivers for a couple of hours a day (just one block - school still accessible by car on two sides). The number of children arriving by active means skyrocketed, and traffic was very light. There is a way to break the ironic-death-spiral of parents driving kids to school because there is too much school traffic for them to otherwise get there safely.
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Yep, not every kid needs to walk or bike for things to improve dramatically.
The right to ‘Clean Air’ and the associated political issues around pollution levels and ICE cars will push the need for community led initiatives to ban ice cars from environments where the vulnerable congregate. And at the same time, should increase the installation of electric charging points as a way to try to encourage EC use.
There was a stat I read, admittedly a decade ago, that 90% of all road vehicle pollution is caused by buses/hgv/lgv/&c.
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I think that stat was correct.
Its one of the reasons why most HGV’s etc aren’t allowed inside the M25.
Vehicle emissions comprise a mix of particulates and gases (CO, CO2, NOx, etc), which depend on the fuel type, emissions regulations, age and condition of vehicle, etc. These have changed considerably in the last decade as has the make up of the UK vehicle fleet. Unfortunately ten-year old stats are not very helpful today, although I expect commercial vehicles remain a significant source of air pollution. Consequently we need more trucks powered by fuel cells.
I was only thinking this the other day - how on earth are lorries going to have large enough batteries for a typical journey, then I remembered Trains. Hmm, perhaps we need a good backbone of train routes with trains that can carry containers which a quick load/unload method, then lorries just used locally
Oh, I thought we were going to scrap HS2, force everybody to abandon their cars and use the trains. Now, you want to take lorries off the roads and put cargo onto the rail network.
Is there a master plan out there somewhere ?
Mater plan? naa, government only plan 5 years ahead at most
I presume that Hitachi has sorted out the Class 800 cracks. There are no trains from Newbury to London, or anywhere else at the moment.