A ‘tyre tax’ will need to be imposed on electric cars to combat poor air quality in cities, the Government’s top clear air adviser has claimed.
The chairman of the Government’s independent science advisory group on air pollution said charges for low-emission zones are likely to be replaced with alternative levies as drivers switch to electric vehicles.
Particles from tyre wear are more dangerous to public health than diesel exhaust fumes, Professor Alastair Lewis said.
Known as “particulate matter (PM) 2.5”, the amount of air pollution is growing because motorists are driving ever larger vehicles with more substantial tyres.
It’s almost like there’s a desire to kill personal and individual mobility or summat.
Why impose a tax on tyres because of EVs? Why not just go the whole hog and stipulate that trucks must only have three wheels. Greenies love to live in the past and there were many three wheeler trucks in the 40s and 50s.
Oh yes, it will just be on electric cars… *rolls eyes*
Given tyre wear is practically non-existent when travelling at a constant speed in a straight line — it’s only under cornering, acceleration and braking that the tyres are doing any work — then there’s going to be a campaign to get rid of speed bumps, chicanes and the like? Thought not.
Oh, and talking of heavy vehicles that start, stop and pull in and out a lot, they’re going to ban buses? Thought not again.
Of course they not going to stop the charges.
Once the government has found a lovely tax revenue stream for them to piss up against the wall, they aren’t going to let it go. They’ll just keep strangling the golden goose until it chokes it’s last gasp, keels over and dies.
Luckily there are plenty of out of town shopping centres so we don’t have to go into these congestion areas. And when they start charging for those, people will just shift to online shopping.
It’ll kill the town centres. But who cares? They’re crappy and full of drunks/druggies/homeless (sometimes all 3 in the same person).
On the other hand, I like the town centres being busy, keeps the countryside quieter.
All these single issue wankers can never see 2nd order effects. Almost as if their terms of reference prohibit it.
SBML: another nostalgia moment. I remember those 3-wheeler British Railways flatbed trucks buzzing around from the station & the railway depot, and I think the mobile greengrocer that came down our street regularly was similarly single-wheeled at the front.
Whatever money they currently extract from the ICE motorist, they will have to extract in future from the electric motorist. Only babes in arms would be foolish enough to think otherwise.
“I remember those 3-wheeler British Railways flatbed trucks buzzing around from the station & the railway depot”
Me too – they were Scammell Scarabs:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scammell_Scarab
You see, I was right all along. In winter we should freeze our rivers and canals and all skate to work.
“It’s almost like there’s a desire to kill personal and individual mobility or summat.”
When are you going to realise that all the ‘climate change’ nonsense is nothing to do with climate, just a thinly disguised sledge hammer to implement socialism globally everywhere at once, thus making sure there is no control experiment to compare it to?
What Jim said.
Perhaps the affected cities should provide a fleet of steel-tyred traction engines and trailers for their deliveries. Road rollers and such. Then they wouldn’t even have to repair their potholes.
Shame about the coal smoke though.
Don’t give politicos their ZIL lanes and they go about banning personal transport. Not their executive limousines and police protection though.
If tire particles are more dangerous – then why, for so many years, has there been emissions testing and taxing but nothing about tires was said until electric vehicles showed up.
This sounds more like a post hoc justification for keeping the gravy train rolling.
I believe the tyre particulate issue is one of those things that has come up because of measuring to ever finer degrees of granularity. Nobody cared before because we weren’t measuring at that level.
If you look at a lot of the climate bollocks it’s driven by increased sensitivity of testing letting them hysterically report on the dangers of something that’s equivalent to one drop of water or less in a swimming pool
Again, proves my contention about Pigou taxation. Once you give a government the power to tax, the tax will become divorced from the reason you gave them the power. There will always be a reason to preserve the revenue.