Incorrect. The TAX is only payable on vehicles that use the ROAD, hence the very accurate colloquialism of Road Tax. You buy a car and use it off road only (racing, rallying, etc.) the tax does not apply regardless of emissions.

Vehicles which use the road have to be registered to use the roads. Vehicles which dont use the roads, such as rally and race cars are not registered and do not have a V5c doc.If a rally car has to go between stages on the highway, it will have to have VED disc, insured and MOT’d ( if required) and must be road legal.
The VED is related to emmisions on vehicles after 2001 . Before this, there is a fixed figure £221 a year currently, which the vehicle owner must pay to ‘use his car on the highway’ Pre’73 cars ( which i believe is being change to pre ’75) do not pay VED , as considered historic vehicles.
The same could be said for motorcycles, for being kept off road and unregistered, although they have a fixed VED for them.
The roads are paid for by central government but the local council are responsible for everyday maintenance, which as we know is completely lacking in every street.

The TAX is only payable on vehicles that use the ROAD, hence the very accurate colloquialism of Road Tax. You buy a car and use it off road only (racing, rallying, etc.) the tax does not apply regardless of emissions.

Same old tired argument.

I can brew my own beer and drink it “off road” without paying Alcohol Duty.
So by your logic it clearly isn’t Alcohol Duty and it would be more accurate to call it “Pub and Off-License Tax”?

The larger point is that the Road Tax colloquialism stems from the Road Fund and gives motorists the entirely false sense that they have extra rights to the road because they “have paid for it” and cyclists haven’t – which is complete bollocks.

Calling it by it’s correct name of Vehicle Excise Duty dispels that one straight away.

I’m not even sure they call it Vehicle Excise Duty any more. The gov.uk and Post Office websites now always seem to call it “Vehicle Tax” or “Car Tax”.

I’ve had that discussion with someone at work and they said a cyclist emits more CO2 than an electric car.

🙄

Hope you explained the difference between taking part in the existing carbon cycle (by breathing) versus releasing new carbon into the cycle (by burning fossil fuels).

Or just slapped them. That would work too.

samuri – Member
I would suggest that as an argument to anti-cyclist people, you spend more time pointing out that every bike, is one less car. It’s one less car in a traffic jam, it’s one less car producing smoke, one less car taking up a parking space and one less car driving over people.

FEWER!!! 😈
.
Point still valid though.

What I would like to know is how much it costs DVLA to issue all these £0.00 tax disc’s on the lowest emission vehicles?

I can’t cite a source for this, but I vaguely remember reading somewhere that the admin overheads in printing and issuing a tax disc was about £15.

Yeah I can imagine that happening

Q – how many years have you held your license
A – minus errrr …… some ? Not sure yet as I’m only 16 and I don’t even have a provisional.

“That will be £1000,000.00 per year please, pay in full or direct debit sir ?”

But wait.. what’s my annual mileage you say? 0? Ok then that’ll be… £0. Direct debit?

What I would like to know is how much it costs DVLA to issue all these £0.00 tax disc’s on the lowest emission vehicles?

It’s not justr low emission vehicles – emergency services vehicles, vehicles owned by a disabled person, cars older than 1973, agriculural vehicles…

The below from http://ipayroadtax.com :

Let’s keep it simple and say the cost to print, distribute and sell each VED disc is a quid. There are about 2 million vehicles which don’t pay VED. That’s two million quid of subsidy to get tax discs to those who don’t pay for them. Those motorists who want cyclists to “pay road tax” need to realise that bicycles, as non-polluting vehicles, would be classified as Band A vehicles and hence would have to pay nowt. With 25 million bicycles in ownership, that would be £25m to get each bicycle a valid tax disc.

There’s the other costs of things like selling a bike on (and changing the name on the “tax disc”) and the fact that bikes can be so easily stripped and split.

Utterly totally unworkable in so many ways.

Problem is you can’t really shout that back at some **** who’s just yelled “pay yer road tx!” as he overtakes at 30mph. Need a swift yet witty response in its place… The swear filter will probably remove any ideas I put forward here.

hate this argument, there is no such thing as “road tax” in the uk, the tax is a levy on vehicle emissions.

But wait.. what’s my annual mileage you say? 0? Ok then that’ll be… £0. Direct debit?

And that’s even less likely to happen

Have you actually ever dealt with an insurance company ??? 😉

They would charge an absolute FORTUNE for that cover, if anyone was ever stupid enough to ask for it.
(If they would even do it at all)

That costs more than the VED I pay on my car.

What would happen if you were run off the road by a Streetview car or an Amazon delivery?

Slightly OT but one of the secondary functions of ved was presumably to capture insurance and mot evaders before the dvla had electronic control of these matters through the mid and electronic mot data.

With those in place i wonder if its time to abolish ved and capture the lost tax at the pumps.

That way the biggest polluters pay and it becomes a tax on emissions.

Mot centres and insurers could then issue an annual window sticker each so that the mot and insurance dodgers can be picked up by traffic wardens etc like they currently do off tax discs.

omg what a set of pedantic ****