UKC

changing car shortly, mostly town driving, short school trips etc, so was thinking petrol. but what car comparisons indicate for our mileage (average just 6k/year) diesel will be £600 cheaper per year for the s-max are looking at.

even if diesel tax shoots up it seems still cheaper, which surprised me a little.

any one have any predictions or recent conclusions on this on a friday afternoon?? i was worried about DPF clogging up but it seems not all diesels have them - no idea how to tell on a particular vehicle though if a DPF is fitted, particularly when looking online.

All modern diesels will have a DPF fitted. A half hour motorway blast once a week should keep it happy though if you can fit that in to your travelling at all!

Are you sure your numbers are correct? Even at 20p per mile you would only be burning £1200 of fuel in a year by doing 6000 miles, so a saving of £600 seems impossible.

For short journeys get a petrol car. Diesel is good for long motorway journeys and does not achieve its performance until the engine is properly warmed up.

The diesel car may come out be cheaper as they have probably become harder to sell so have been reduced in price. The fuel cost for only 6k per year (certainly the difference between a petrol and diesel) is likely to be minor in comparison with the car devaluation so other factors are more relevant if buying a new car.

Given what we we know about diesel now (admittedly not all the facts are clear), aren't there considerations other than cost to take in to account? Your and other people's health for instance?

For your described use, petrol for sure.

Diesel will barely warm up on shorter journeys and you won't get the higher mpg figures anyway. Due to a change in lifestyle, my diesel (yes, it is a Skoda Octavia Estate!) is spending a lot of time on short journeys at the moment (fortunately a short term thing) and the mpg has dropped 10% at least even compared to more extended urban driving, just because its not working at full efficiency when cold. Anything under 15-20 minutes of urban driving is basically not getting the engine warmed up. I'm also having to make sure I get a deliberate motorway blast in every week or so to help stop the DPF getting clogged.

Your potential S-Max will have a DPF, think they all do now. 

This. 

I'm appalled given all the information that is clearly available, even in the mainstream media, you are considering it.  IMHO, diesel drivers will be pariahs in the near future. 

And you have kids. Watch this as an hour of your 'car purchase research' http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09m2djj

diesel cars produce vastly less CO2 than petrol - which the climate figures released this week would suggest is an important issue to be addressed - they also, by dint of using far less fuel than petrol require far less shipping and far less production resource.

but you know, do try and be as simplistic as possible. like.

It is, but if you have to prioritise over climate change or localised air pollution then localised air pollution should be more pressing as it has a faster, more direct, impact on health.

Big difference between diesel for a country dweller and diesel for a townie, wouldn't you agree?

What about thinking of going electric?  You can pick up a lightly used nissan leaf for about £13k   these days.  very low fuel cost and arguably greener.    Designed for the sort of mileage and journeys you do.  (lots on the market at the moment as they have just announced their higher mileage 2018 model)

Quite a few of the local taxi drivers who do short trips around town are switching from Diesel to electric as it seems to have reached a tipping point for them in terms of cost and range.  I borrowed one to drive the other week and i was really impressed with how nice it was.

My petrol Seat Leon costs about 12p a mile in fuel, based on 75% town driving 25% motorway driving. 6,000 Miles would cost £720. 

Real MPG figures for the diesel suggest about 20-25% improvement,so savings on fuel of less than  £200.

Not unless the country dweller never wants to drive into a town. It only needs a few streets of constant stop start traffic to cause a problem, not many square miles of urbanisation. 

My diesel car archives it stated MPG on my normal driving mainly long distance duel carriageway. Approx 67mpg

The last week I have had to do lots of town driving and I am currently at around 50mpg

Can't say what a petrol would be like as I have only been driving 2 years and have never had one but be careful on stated MPG on a comparison site as i guess it would not be accurate 

Oh purlease, If the OP is looking to buy second hand it makes no difference. Unless of course you are advocating all diesel cars be scrapped rather than sold. That's hardly green.

I drove an electric car recently and loved it, it felt really modern.

However, not as cheap as you might think. My mate borrowed a bmw and it took 30kw to charge it overnight. That's like having your kettle on for 10 hours.

It works out to be about £5 per 100 miles, so probably half the petrol costs. How long before the cost goes up with demand though?

The range is still a limiting factor in my opinion. Plus it's no good if you have side of the road parking.

That's shipping, freight, farming and railways buggered, then.  You simply can't be as dogmatic as 'diesel bad, petrol less bad'.  Its a case of the least bad choice for the application and for rural applications I would suggest that diesel is still the better choice.

Why is that a reason to prioritise it?  In fact, it's that sort of reasoning that has got us in to mess we are with climate change - prioritising the trivial immediate problems, over the serious long-term ones.

Petrol for that  mileage. 

I have a diesel, but its Euro 6 with Adblue which reduces the nitrogen oxide output - not quite so bad, especially as CO2 is down on petrol.  Still a leper though.  My conscience is salved by cycling 6,000 miles a year, mostly on my commute.

You 'read it here first'.

I promise you that the combustion engine in general, and the diesel combustion engine more specifically, is in it's dying days

So as I look to buy a second hand car, living in a big city, I shouldn't care if it's a diesel as long as it's second hand?

OK.

I don't know where you people live, but here diesel is more expensive than petrol. 

Oh purlease, you clearly don't realise the scale of the problem, and yes I am.

As for 'green', please don't throw the catch all phrase around, in this instance I am concerned about localised air quality, rather than supply chain and embedded energy and CO2 costs. 

thanks. never sure how to calculate depreciation - but as we'd likely keep it for a number of years i doubt it's a big issue. current car cost 9K about 8 years ago, now valued for part exchange at 700 quid

thought about, just still too much second hand. plus need something a) bigger than a leaf and b) will do a few longer journeys each year e.g. family camping trips to cornwall 

did hear a nice idea from renault where you buy their electric car, and twice a year you can get a regular petrol or diesel for when you want to go on holiday as part of the rpice. the new cost of their electric car is still way too high for our budget though

whatcar apparently uses their real world figures rather than manufacturers figures. quite how teh car companies get away with what they advertise i'll never know!

The manfacturers figures are on a completely artificial test basis, but its identical for all vehicles, so gives you a chance to compare vehicles. If car a gets 52mpg and car b 58mpg, you are just as unlikely to achieve either figure in real life, but  car b will be more economical than car a.

The what car figs will be more representative than the official figs, but subject to variations in test, so not such a good comparison between cars.

where i am diesel is around 1p to 2p more expensive than petrol.  my car has a 70ltr tank - so lets say its costs around £1.50 more to fill up with diesel than petrol - and it will do about 800 miles on the motorway at 70-80, or 900 miles at 60-70 on the motorway on that full tank.

an equivilant sized petrol car (large family estate) with a 70ltr tank will be lucky to 600 miles, let alone 800. at which point that £1.50 starts to look like a bargain...

We have had diesel cars for 30 years, but now purchased a petrol for the first time.

Change of circumstances mean lower mileage (5 - 10K year) of mainly town or shopping trips, coupled with the adverse publicity and not knowing how the governments may penalise them guided our change. A recent trip to Heathrow (170 miles), steady down the M4, gave 63mpg but it gives less around our country lanes, obviously.

I missed this one.

Since when is air quality trivial? It is equally as serious as climate change. 

It simply isn't.  Climate change threatens the lives and livelihoods of 100s of millions of people and entire ecosystems.  In developed world cities, air quality at worst knocks a few years off your life  expectancy.  It is trivial in comparison and also it is trivial to solve.  If there is choice between solving these two (I'm not sure there is in fact), we should go for climate change every time.

Care to say how long this dying phase is ? what with all the world's freight (apart from aviation) and agriculture being powered by diesel and all ?  Not to mention the myriad of pumping stations, back up generators etc.

Diesel cars will go first but I reckon at least 50 years before they leave, say, India.

I've spent the last 8 years + working on climate change so I'm not going to argue with you about this - I stand firm on my view. 

How the hell did you extrapolate that from my post? I’m not even gonna answer the question because it’s so far out of context to the point I was making. And I think you know that.

I bought a petrol.  I loved my diesel,  but the petrol is really really good. 

I get about 45 mpg on Longer runs to written and back and would elect to get more on proper long journeys.  

Lots of issues with people having problems with modern dpfs even if they do the long run once week 

Could you at least outline your thinking? Resorting to claimed authority isn't very convincing.

it's not an extrapolation of your post. It's a question to challenge your thinking and show that, depending on the situation, yes it does matter. 

Agreed and on that basis I’ve decided NOT to buy an electric car. With current uk energy mix (ie lots of natural gas) and inefficiency of generation transmissions and charging, the co2/mile is about double that of a small petrol car. Yes, electric is double petrol. And that’s before you consider the environmental cost of making and disposing of all those lithium batteries.. I was shocked!

That's wildly out of date. A typical EV currently has a well-to-wheel lifetime CO2 impact of around a quarter of an ICE car, including embedded emissions.

I'm not really resorting to claimed authority, I am simply giving weight to why I am standing by my view. Others are free to hold different views.

Climate change is a significant problem. Here and now, and more so in the future. Addressing the issue of climate change, and it's impacts will take a lot of time and potentially be very complicated. It is not clearly understood what the linkage is. It's impact may not be directly related to health, but to uninhabitable environments, natural catastrophes, spread of disease and the like. Do you go with current CO2 levels, methane levels, and their impacts, do you worry about future warming based on current levels, or levels if emissions stay constant, increase, or decrease. Effects are also an usual dichotomy of global and localised. Who is responsible for what?

Air quality, in the form of SOx, NOx and PMs, is measurable, locally relatively to the source. It's impact is direct and obvious, it is short term. It effects the lungs of people in the vicinity of poor air quality. The cause are known and can be addressed. Immediate action will have immediate affects. 

I hope that helps support my position a little. 

Yet somehow, someone always trots out some uncited and factually wildly inaccurate “fact” that EVs produce more CO2 than ICE vehicles. 

Next thing you know, they’ll go on to mention the impact of lithium mining, ignoring the massive impact of oil extraction (which has had more wars faught over it - lithium or oil) or the likelihood that the lithium will remain in use indefinitely with battery recycling, whereas the oil gets used once then more is mined...

... and finally they'll say that the batteries will wear out in three years anyway!

OP: if the vast majority of your trips are sub-20 miles, it might just be worth looking at a new, leased EV with range extender or plug-in hybrid. When I did the maths it turned out that it cost me about 50p/day to go from my old Yeti to a brand new Mitsubishi PHEV. To make it economical you really do need to be doing at least half your milage in short, battery-only trips though. 

I've never seen that before. Thanks for pointing it out.

Will defiantly use it if I go to buy a new car

I looked up your profile to see where you live... Yes London has its issues... I drove round part of the M25 early the saturday morning before Christmas and found it stinking of fumes even though traffic was very light (there was an inversion). So I agree that cities need to address the use of diesels.

However I live on Skye (nearest M&S for example is 90 miles away, nearest shop is 5 miles and administrative centre/secondary school is 25 miles) so the economy of a diesel is a major factor and the effect of emissions, while still an issue, is less so. So I think it'll be a while before there's a real alternative to diesels in rural areas.

Then I scrolled down your profile and found you're keen on motorsport!!!!! Ha ha ha.

Don't live in London anymore.

And yes, I race cars. I'm not a hair shirt wearing greeny.

Our company car scheme does this - they offer only diesel or electric. If you choose an electric car you get the use of a diesel rental for holidays as well to help assuage any range anxiety people might have.

'Confidential data from maritime industry insiders based on engine size and the quality of fuel typically used by ships and cars shows that just 15 of the world's biggest ships may now emit as much pollution as all the world's 760m cars. '

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2009/apr/09/shipping-pollution

Also, carbon monoxide emissions are a factor with increased use of petrol cars. 

I bought a new Diesel in 2016 and really regret the decision.

Firstly, the DPF is not a problem for us -- we drive on the Autobahn every day on the 20 km run to work and back. In the beginning, the fuel efficiency was good: well above 60 mpg and occasionally even above 70. Then we started having Problems.

And there seems to be no known solution to them. The workshops resorted to many, many rounds of part replacements -- the shotgun-approach. (We saw the parts list for the last round of replacements even though we shouldn't have because the guarantee was covering the parts (a friendly guy at the workshop let us see it) and it was well over 4000 Euro. There's simply no way we would have been able to cover that bill! Even after that, they still can't tell us what the problem was, concretely, or give us any indication that it is guaranteed solved.

After the problems started, the good fuel consumption ended. We're on about 47 mpg, now and there seems to be nothing we can do about it. 22 000 km and about 18 months of ownership and we're stuck with a dud.

I wouldn't touch another diesel. We're looking to get rid of ours as soon as.

you're problem isn't that its a diesel, or a petrol, or a hybrid, or an electric, its that its a dud.

you may as well claim its problems are because its grey or whatever...

Indeed.

Mind you more modern ICE cars are more prone to really hard to diagnose and then ££££ to fix problems because complexity has been layered on complexity to try and reduce pollution and increase efficiency.  Is staggering how much simpler a modern EV is, and it’s looking like that’s strongly reflected in servicing costs.  I imagine they’ll be less likely to generate duds as well... 

Bet you wish you'd leased now!

Last year, we had injector trouble with a VAG car, probably way over 4 figures, which we can ill afford, a few phone calls and all sorted (eventually!) including replacement vehicle.  All for the princely sum of sod all

Wrong again. 

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/jul/15/nearly-9500-people-die-...

At the moment buying a small second hand petrol car is the most environmentally/climate friendly choice in car. The drive to eliminate petrol was chiefly a German car maker/ EU stitch up. Made it almost impossible to buy anything other than diesel. Took US to expose the scandal. No one has gone to prison and no punitive fines. And people say we need the EU to protect the environment. EPA uch more powerful regulator. 

It might. But my comment is based on an interview with a professor at the Wolfson Atmospheric Chemistry Institute at the University if York.  His work was key to exposing the switch to diesel scandal. For which he blames the EU and German car lobby. He is, by the way, very supportive of the EU. On this, however, he thinks they got it badly wrong. As a aside I asked what car should one buy? He said a five year old small engined petrol. Most definitely not diesel. And also not a new or even second hand hybrid. Why? Well his argument involved the embedded carbon in the newer vehicle, the fact that the energy source for the EV would likely be carbon based. So, on both climate and particulates that would be his choice. Me, I would prefer the V8 any day. 

But it's not trivial to solve and with every diesel sold will get less trivial.

Its not every diesel sold, its every diesel used in highly populated and busy areas.

That doesn't contradict anything I said.