One of my other cars has been roadtaxed to death, it's literally worthless because despite returning mid thirties MPG, it's official figure for CO2 is 256g/km, which nudges it into the top tier £570/year road tax bracket. Meanwhile, my 3.9efi v8 D1 that returns ~8mpg (big aggressive tyres, loads of offroad toys, racy engine tune, heavy right foot) is £270/year. As for electric cars... I live in Peterhead, just along the coast from us, we have this great big fracking thing...
...which burns north sea gas to make electrical power, try and tell me that none of that electricity powers these "Zero Emmissions Vehicles"? Or nothing from this behemoth called "Drax":
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Really all those Teslas and Zoes run on rainbows kissing solar panels and unicorn farts turning windmills...
I see a few teslas on the school run, I smile to myself thinking it's nice that you are trying, but if you are charging that off the grid, which up here features a lot of power from the gas powerplant, you're kind of missing the point.
I honestly think that
sustainable biodiesel is probably more ecologically sound than carbon producing electricity powering EV's. By sustainable biodiesel I mean it has to either be upcycled cooking oil, or produced from reasonable crops, like rapeseed rather than palmoil, which is typically produced in the far east in fields created by clearing rain forests. Things like rapeseed could be produced in larger quantities, locally, or at least domestically, possibly using fields laying sallow due to common agricultural policy which handicapped our efficient farmers to make a "fairer" or "more competitive" marketplace in the EGU.
Even with the carbon from the biodiesel, it started in the atmosphere, got pulled into the plant that made the vegie oil, serves a life in the food industries, and gets recycled into fuel releasing its carbon back to whence it came from. Granted there is the carbon from processing crop to oil to fuel, that can be done with renewables, and you'd be using the plant oil as energy storage. Meanwhile the typical EV has rare earth elements mined and refined in china, shipped to japan/usa for manufacturing into batteries, common materials processed by mining and extracting or recycling to make the rest of the vehicle, shipped to a factory, made into a new car, then running on hopefully sensibly renewable produced electricity, or if its ran off dirty electricity it's never ever ever going to offset its carbon footprint from being made. Then there is battery life / recycling etc...
