How to beat the budget car tax increase

You can still buy a family car or even a 4x4 without paying high car taxes and destroying the planet. Under the new CO2 rules, buy a BMW 3 series or a VW Golf and you could pay up to £750 in tax - or nothing at all



In the short term, the big losers are those driving large petrol-engined cars. Over the next two years they will see their annual road tax bill climb by between £100 and £200.

However, the real shock will come in 2010, when new car buyers face the so-called showroom tax - a higher road tax in the first year that reflects the car's CO2 emissions.

Cars that emit more than 255g of carbon dioxide per kilometre, such as the Ranger Rover Sport and any Ferrari, will come with an £950 bill for the first year's tax - a significant sum, although short of the £2,000-£5,000 demanded by environmental groups.

At the other end of the spectrum, anyone buying a brand new car in 2010 that emits less than 165g of CO2/km will get the first year's car tax for free.

This group includes most small- and mid-sized cars, and also what many would consider some quite serious cars. The BMW 3 series 2.0 litre diesel car, emits just 128g/km, and after the first year the road-tax bill will be just £35 a year.

Compare that to the same model, a 3-series with a sporty 3.5 litre petrol engine, and the bills are quite different. In the first year the buyer will pay £550, and £310 a year from then.

These anomalies will apply across all the manufacturers' ranges of cars. In short, the new regime favours those who are happy to downsize or switch to diesel.

Take the Toyota Avensis estate. By 2010 a petrol 1.8 will cost £210 a year to tax, while the slightly larger diesel (2.0 litre) will cost £125 a year because it emits less C02. In comparison, the tiny Citroen C1 and the like will cost just £20 to tax, from March 2009 onwards

If you are buying a used car now, you need to look closely at what you'll be paying to tax your chosen model in the future.

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Who are you calling an old boiler?

Old heating systems are also extremely inefficient; they waste millions of pounds each year through heat escaping via the flue and from over-heating because of outdated or absent thermostats. Research by the Energy Savings Trust (EST) reveals that one third of British households heat their homes to 22-23C (72-73F). That's hotter than a sunny day on the Med. One in 10 homes (2.5million) is heated to 25C - the same temperature as an average day in the Canary Islands.

This underlines a trend in over-heating homes, with an average rise of one degree every decade in the temperature of the nation's living rooms, from 16C in the 1960s to 20.5C today.
he EST calculates that by switching to modern condensing boiler systems with proper thermostats set at 21C, we could prevent the release of 2.8million tonnes of CO\u2082 per year and the average household could save between £110 and £190 on its annual heating bills.

A condensing boiler works by capturing waste heat that normally escapes into the atmosphere via the flue. Condensing boilers cost between £800 and £1,500. That is £150-£200 more than a conventional boiler of equivalent make and output, so a condensing boiler will pay for itself within a year or so.
by Sarah Lonsdale

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Biofuels: Fields of dreams

We can run our cars on corn, sugar cane or wheat: limitless cheap energy grown on our doorstep. But are biofuels the answer to exhausted oil wells or just another nightmare scenario?
ohn Anderson is motoring with chip fat. Sir Rob Margetts swears by fizzy drinks and chicken feed. George Bush is banking on corn. Everyone, from pub to parliament, knows we’re going to have to do something about transport fuel. Oil prices have already passed the threshold of pain, and emissions targets for greenhouse gases will not be met unless we wean ourselves off petrol.

The solution is both easy and obvious. In place of fossil energy – the power of ancient sunlight – we can recover the solar energy locked up in field crops, which, unlike mineral oils, we can endlessly replenish. With plant oils in the tank, we will ride to work on sunbeams.

There are two kinds of biofuel – biodiesel, which is made from oil-rich crops such as rape, soy and palm; and bioethanol, which substitutes for petrol and is made from starchy crops such as sugar cane, beet, maize and wheat. The case against biodiesel is that virgin rainforest in Indonesia and Malaysia is being cut down to make way for soy and palm. Result: more CO2 is being released into the atmosphere by deforestation than is being saved by reductions in fossil fuel.

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High CO2 cars targeted by budget

Cars that produce large amounts of carbon dioxide (CO2) will be hit by new measures in Wednesday's budget, according to reports.

Chancellor Alistair Darling is expected to introduce measures to encourage the use of cars with low CO2 emissions.

Weekend newspaper reports say the Chancellor might introduce a levy on new, larger cars that could increase their price by £2,000.

The tax would hit new saloons, estates and people carriers the reports say.

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