If I can shift my MG I fancy the idea of not paying much tax on my next car…I like the look of something like the Fiat Panda Multijet diesel that only costs £35 a year.
Anyone using one and what’s it like to use on a daily basis? My commute is a country road pootle so I don’t need great motorway performance!

Cheers.

Don’t have to pay any road fund license on my new Golf..

It’s never gonna set yer heart alight, but as a company car it costs me buttons a month to run..

Even with paying for a fuel card aswell, it’s still cheap.. Very cheap.

You’ll be surprised what sneaks into band c for VED. Our Audi A3 1.9TDIe being one of them.

Wife has a BMW 118d, its £35 a year tax. She has a 60 mile each way commute everyday. She loves it. You have to get an 08 reg or newer to get the 119 CO g/Km.

should have said I’ll be looking at second hand and as cheap as possible…not sure how much but I doubt I’ll get a golf! probably much smaller and cheaper.

Well, i didnt know that bit did I, lol. Sorry I’ve been no help at all. Good luck

i had a punto with the 1.3 multijet engine, it was fine, i went up and down the country in it no problems.
it was reliable, quick enough etc.
not all that great on fuel though, about 53 mpg average, same as my mondeo.

They’re not all the same! Lots of differnt cars in that category or better. New Prius is band A so free tax and has 138bhp for instance, or the Honda CR-Z that’s band C too.

However options are limited if you are looking super cheap and second hand… They only started getting good at making low emissions cars recently 🙂 Depends how cheap tho – a MkII Prius can be had for 4k or so.

One of our friends has a C1. She does a reasonable similar drive to work as me, about 15 miles each way. She seems to leave and arrive at similar times too and uses almost half the petrol 😉 If I limp my car along I can get 50mpg+, she reckons she’s getting around 70-80mpg. Dunno how true that is but the car is half the size of mine. Wouldn’t like to drive it anywhere other than to work and back though.

If you are looking for a cheaper car, then don’t ignore everything in the tax bracket above.
If I am right then group F is £125 a year. That is less than £10 extra per month and you are more likely to find a cheaper car. It seems everyone wants to have the cheap tax and pay more just for that, which makes no sense.

just sold my clio 1.5 dci (85ps) which was band B

was surprisingly quick (100bhp/tonne), very economical (70mpg) and pretty decent to drive for a small car.

EDIT:

If you are looking for a cheaper car, then don’t ignore everything in the tax bracket above.

+1, fuel economy is much more important than tax for cheap motoring.

MkII Prius can be had for 4k or so.

I still do not get how any hybrid car can be seen as environmentally friendly. The embedded energy is huge by comparison to most other cars, and if you get a well built conventional diesel and maintain it properly, it’s probably good for 3x as many miles as any hybrid before it carks it. Pure abuse of the figures really…

Mtbmatt speaks well. I had the tracking done on the Prius and the guy caught sight of the tax disc and was staggered that it was only £15 – he kept going on about it.

Well I paid 18 grand for it new (ish), it’s had three sets of tyres, a lot of petrol, 150-200 a year servicing, 40/mo insurance and all the rest. His car was an old Civic Type R and he could be using maybe twice as much fuel as me possibly costing 400 quid extra on fuel alone, but he didn’t seem at all concerned about that larger figure.

Strange that people would be more concerned about one of the smallest expenses than some of the larger.

Pure abuse of the figures really…

Yeah yeah we’ve had this before. As far as I can tell your information comes only from one false study published in the USA and repeated in the media. If you’ve got any proper figures please PM me with them as I’d love to know. Personally I cant’ see how one 30kg battery can take twice as much energy as the rest of the car to produce, which is what you’re saying.

There is no £35 a year Tax band it’s £30 according to the Directgov site. My wife’s Yaris diesel is Band C and my Smart diesel is Band A.

Yeah yeah we’ve had this before. As far as I can tell your information comes only from one false study published in the USA and repeated in the media. If you’ve got any proper figures please PM me with them as I’d love to know. Personally I cant’ see how one 30kg battery can take twice as much energy as the rest of the car to produce, which is what you’re saying.

There are many studies out there, but most seem to be a few years old, which is useless both for the hybrid and the diesel. However, some things to ponder…

Ford Focus Diesel, 109 g CO2 / km

Newest Prius, 92 g CO2 / km

Whilst the headline figure is that the Prius is better on fuel, it will have cost considerably more energy to build, and almost certainly won’t do 150k+ miles before popping its clogs. (A friend’s – admittedly early – Prius needed new batteries after 60K). It also costs considerably more than the Focus. With which you could switch to a green energy supplier, fit solar thermal supplementary heating, or even (if you were determined to be green) get a turbine.

This Bluemotion Golf, 99 g CO2 / km is also cheaper than the Prius, has almost exactly the same tailpipe emissions, and again will do many more miles before it dies.

You should also bear in mind just how environmentally harmful that Ni in your battery is, and 30kg is a lot of it. It caused pollution being mined, caused pollution being transported and turned into said battery, and will cause pollution (or a lot of energy to be expended to minimise that pollution) when it needs disposal.

So no, Hybrids aren’t that great really. Given a conventional car will probably run for twice as long, with marginally higher emissions, and save you some money to make some real emission saving elsewhere in your life too…

It caused pollution being mined, caused pollution being transported and turned into said battery, and will cause pollution (or a lot of energy to be expended to minimise that pollution) when it needs disposal

Whereas oil mining and refining doesn’t cause pollution and petrol doesn’t require transportation.

There are many studies out there

I couldn’t find anything sensible, the media hype polluted the results too much.

Newest Prius with the smaller wheels is 89g/km btw.

it will have cost considerably more energy to build

Facts please.

and almost certainly won’t do 150k+ miles before popping its clogs

They do 200k regularly and there are already plenty of 300k cars out there. Stories here: http://priuschat.com/forums/gen-ii-prius-main-forum/79235-299-999-mile-club.html

The famous (on that site) Canadian taxi has now done a million km and is still going.

Another snippet about batteries:

http://green.autoblog.com/2011/01/07/consumer-reports-tests-old-2002-prius/3

You should also bear in mind just how environmentally harmful that Ni in your battery is, and 30kg is a lot of it. It caused pollution being mined,

I thought most commercially used nickel was recycled?

Anyway a few more thoughts (if you really want a fair discussion and not a flame war):

– Diesel can produce a lot more CO2 in its refinement, ask TINAS about this or search on here.
– Diesel produces far more other pollutants like NOx and particulates.
– Prius won most reliable family car award on I think it was JD power or similar recently
– A new shape Prius is bigger than a Golf (not to mention a lot quicker than the bluemotion wich has some issues from what I can tell)
– Priuses are made in a super eco-friendly factory
– The battery is modular and individual cells can be replaced I think
– The govt fuel consumption figures are quite achievable apparently, unlike in the Golf. Many many stories about how the bluemotion and similar cars from other makes are almost impossible to match the govt figures.
– It has a 30kg battery but it doens’t contain a great big 60kg gearbox which also takes a lot of materials and manufacturing
– The car is mainly made for the US market where diesels are banned or heavily restricted due to strict NOx emission laws

Bluemotion/ecotec etc cars are good, don’t get me wrong, but I don’t think it’s as cut and dried as you make out, and I am 100% sure it doesn’t take THREE TIMES more energy than you claimed earlier simply because it has a battery.

Bluemotion/ecotec etc cars are good, don’t get me wrong, but I don’t think it’s as cut and dried as you make out, and I am 100% sure it doesn’t take THREE TIMES more energy than you claimed earlier simply because it has a battery.

No I didn’t, I estimated that a diesel would do 3x as many miles.

If you don’t want a ‘flame war’, perhaps try to read what I posted.

Anyway, horses for courses. If you use a hybrid mainly for city driving (where you could catch a bus and save real emissions), then yes, it’ll be better than most normal cars. However, the most modern conventional cars that turn your engine off also save a lot of fuel in this case. If you use one mainly for long distances on country roads or the motorway, I have no idea how a conventional 1.8 petrol (which is all it is in this scenario) will return better economy than any modern diesel – bluemotion or not. (I note its conventional engine appears to have increased in size since its 1.5L introduction).

– Diesel produces far more other pollutants like NOx and particulates.

Even modern ones with particulate filters and catalytic converters?

– Diesel can produce a lot more CO2 in its refinement, ask TINAS about this or search on here.

It can also be produced by pyrolysis from organic wastes, and the by-product used to amend soils – in some circumstances increasing crop yields and long-term carbon storage. (Obviously it can also be produced from 1st generation energy crops, but that would be a bit silly seeing as we don’t have enough food to feed ourselves so shouldn’t really be trying to feed our cars too this way.)

No I didn’t, I estimated that a diesel would do 3x as many miles.

I beg your pardon. But I still don’t want a flame war so please accept my apologies 🙂

I have no idea how a conventional 1.8 petrol (which is all it is in this scenario) will return better economy than any modern diesel

Well it’s not a conventional 1.8l petrol. It’s a pseudo Atkinson cycle engine which means that the expansion stroke is longer than the compresion stroke, making it more thermodynamically efficient regardless of if you are driving on a motorway or not. It’s got no drive belts, water pump and so on being all electric, which reduces drag significantly. The transmission also helps motorway driving by giving a massive range of effective gearing. My car cruises down the motorway at about 1800rpm or so I reckon, lower revs than even my bigger diesel. The crankshaft is offset which improves efficiency, but this might be used in other engines too. On the new cars there is an extra coolant circuit to pipe coolant through the exhaust to heat it up super quickly and improve cold start efficiency.

Then there’s the car itself. The shape is a specific design called something like Kaffenback after some German 1930s engineer (but I think I got that name wrong) who realised that aerodynamic gains from having a long tail behind a car (to reduce vorticies behind) were cancelled out by surface drag – the ideal cut off point is when the cross sectional area is half that of the maximum. Still the most aerodynamic car on the road afaik.

Another big benefit I’ve found is how well the car rolls when you lift off. On my old commute to Hampshire down the M4 and then onto country roads at reading I could be much more efficient in the Prius rolling along the lanes by putting in a burst of fuel at the right times; I coudl not improve my MPG over the motoway driving a diesel because I could not roll as well.

Even modern ones with particulate filters and catalytic converters?

Well I THINK that DPFs dont’ remove all the particulates, but I’m not sure. However, a cat doesn’t remove NOx. It’s an inherent trait of diesels due to the higher combustion temperature reacting unused oxygen in the cylinder with the nitrogen. EGR reduces this but still doesn’t eliminate it. You couldn’t buy a VW TDI in the USA for this reason until I think 2009, and they had to add a pretty complicated exhaust gas scrubber on top of the DPF to make it legal.. and many people think DPFs alone are bad enough.

It can also be produced by…*snip*

Yep. I can’t wait for them to figure out how to produce biodiesel in all its forms on a large enough scale. Or for that matter bio-ethanol from cellulose. Would be good. If we had plenty of biodiesel I’d trade in my Prius no questions.

Well, in that case, they’ve come on a lot since the Mk1s, which were decidedly ordinary in almost every respect compared to the high pressure diesels that were starting to arrive.

I’m not totally convinced, but you’ve certainly improved my opinion of them. I’ll consider myself educated, and with that, say goodnight – it’s late down-under…

Well, in that case, they’ve come on a lot since the Mk1s, which were decidedly ordinary in almost every respect compared to the high pressure diesels that were starting to arrive.

I won’t argue there. The MkIs were crap, although an important test bed I suppose.

It’s an amazing piece of engineering for sure – by far and away the most innovative car in decades for all sorts of reasons. Most manufacturers trumpet the tiniest change as a big deal, when Priuses are stuffed with cool things that there isn’t even enough space in motoring mag columns to report. The US MkII had a thermos flask in the coolant circuit that pumped hot coolant in when you shut it off, and put it back when you started off again to minimise warmup time. It also had an expansion bladder in the fuel tank to take up space as you used fuel so that when you filled up you didn’t displace loads of petrol fumes which are really bad for the environment. Did make it a bit of a pain to fill though apparently. I would still like to find out for sure the energy cost of the battery mind…

Have a good night, try not to get flooded out or have your house collapse on you 🙁

Aside from the hybrid debate, another vote for a 1.5DCi clio here, £30 a year to tax, over 60MPG and pretty nippy about town and country lanes. As said above this type of car isn’t going to be massively quick, but compared to the saab aero I used to have it’ll do about 5k miles and be taxed for just the price of the tax on the saab! 😀

my 2001 1.4 tdi audi a2 ticks all the boxes. Lightweight (aluminium moncoque), good economy (over 60mpg for all journeys), cheap (can be picked up for about £3.5k with FSH), Band C, low drag (kamm tail design, when released had the lowest drag coefficient for any car in it’s class), well built etc.

funny how it was so ahead of it’s time, and then audi stopped making them in 2005…

funny how it was so ahead of it’s time, and then audi stopped making them in 2005…

I suppose there’s not much use in a luxury brand making low-level cars.. that’s why most manufs have at least one budget brand and and one premium one, despite them being mainly the same. Merc don’t seem to do this, apart from Smart.

but then they’ve gone back in with the A1, which technologically is lightyears behind the A2. Apparently Audi never turned a profit on the A2, might have been better off lowering the price to sell more i suppose. It was mainly an engineering exercise to learn mass production techniques for aluminium space frames they now use in the A8, R8 and parts of the A7 and new A6.