Electric Plugin Hybrid Cars Environment Friendly City Switch

CliveS said:

Vehicles without this switch including vans should not receive a grant,

The grant is related to the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, so whether it's in a city or not is irrelevant. If you want to suggest that city clean air charging should be linked to this then that would be a better argument. But I agree with Andy, it's really not the biggest problem right now. 

We did buy a PHEV to replace my wife's petrol car, because we live in a relatively remote rural area so we're either driving short distance fully electric or considerably longer distances where, as Andy says, charging is currently a pain. (Hopefully sense will prevail and the amount of charging will improve.) But we found when buying ours that PHEVs are rare beats, very few manufacturers are bothering to make them now as they are not the right vehicle for most people. In the SUV class we were looking for there was basically a choice of one, and even that one is no longer sold in the UK as there was seen to be no market for it. Which given that SUVs must be about the most popular class of car now tells us something!

There's a really good way to reduce particulate and other emissions in cities, which is to improve public transport... (I know people can say "you would say that, you work in the rail industry". I would turn that round and say that I work in the rail industry because I feel it's potentially beneficial to society.) Wrote that before Simon posted his much neater sentence! 

CliveS said:

Vehicles without this switch including vans should not receive a grant,

The grant is related to the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, so whether it's in a city or not is irrelevant. If you want to suggest that city clean air charging should be linked to this then that would be a better argument. But I agree with Andy, it's really not the biggest problem right now. 

We did buy a PHEV to replace my wife's petrol car, because we live in a relatively remote rural area so we're either driving short distance fully electric or considerably longer distances where, as Andy says, charging is currently a pain. (Hopefully sense will prevail and the amount of charging will improve.) But we found when buying ours that PHEVs are rare beats, very few manufacturers are bothering to make them now as they are not the right vehicle for most people. In the SUV class we were looking for there was basically a choice of one, and even that one is no longer sold in the UK as there was seen to be no market for it. Which given that SUVs must be about the most popular class of car now tells us something!

There's a really good way to reduce particulate and other emissions in cities, which is to improve public transport... (I know people can say "you would say that, you work in the rail industry". I would turn that round and say that I work in the rail industry because I feel it's potentially beneficial to society.) Wrote that before Simon posted his much neater sentence!