lol-lol

Hmm.... ..

Good calculating. Lump sum got last week was closer to £80k, sum 3 times that into Drawdown fund but spending it fast to avoid £500 / £1k interest in the remainder of this tax year as already had some interest receipts. Current UK tax laws, I feel, are squeezing the large middle class but then encouraging people to spend, rather than stuff away in ISA etc is probably a good thing too else you end up like Japan did for a couple of decades ie stagflation. Clear the mortgage in the next few weeks, become debt free, enjoy retirement though with Trump in the White House my area of work has never been in such demand !

AVOIDANCE not EVASION. The tax rules are what the last Con government and now the Labour government now try and apply to keep itself funded. The £70B a year in Salary sacrifice AVOIDANCE fund the UK Gilt market which current and previous uk governments rely on to fund their massive debt which trebled from £1T in 2010 to £3T in 2024. Worked as a HMCE / HMRC Officer, raised millions in extra taxes, pwc made me a better offer, happens all the time with individuals who are performing well, shame civil service is not flexible to keep us, git £150 bones for one if the multi million pound under dec cases, wow. I will try not to pay any interest on savings so as well the EV i will buy some more batteries and solar panels. Provably won't even buy an ISA as I don't believe that tax avoidance measures is good form. One of daughters is being offered salary sacrifice scheme at work, she is not massively paid but that tax avoidance measure is a good one to help biukd a good sized pension fund and is why, j believe, RR had to raise the Employers NI % as more abd more firms are adopting SS. Not used SS for EVs so paid massive ta. On my car allowance. Continue to pay lots of Income tax and NI butvtgat will stop shortly when I retire in a few days. What will the government do without me I wonder.

Some monthly payments on the Renault PCP deals ie sub £100 a month, are less than the savings one is making on fuel over ICE cars. The pill to swallow is the big dollap off customer deposit which have been great ie on the Megane e it was zero to get on the zero percent but on the 5 it is a massive 40% deposit when it was only 30 % though but when the car is only £21k not so painful compared to some car purchases. Renault can get away with this due to demand for the 5 and, of course, with most European Car makers they are financially right up sh1te creek with the current Chinese invasion which is being partially being held back with EU Antidumping duty but not in the UK yet, Rachel Reeves should think about some ADD, not as high as EU but some. MG etc are effectively getting Chinese state aid. My problem is having £9k a year car allowance but that will shortly end. If I was to pay £1k tax pa on money sitting in savings accounts may as well spend it and dip under £1k / £500 interest earned, help government out with its tax receipts and have a funky little R5, must order my baguette holder.

Certainly seen that with my Scenic EV and the Zoe and in both cases if you are happy with the monthly payment and got it on pcp then one has the choice, give back to manufacturer or keep. Renault 5 might be my first EV that i buy after the pcp, £11k is the balloon payment and of course the R5 can do Vehicle to Load and my version is LFP monitor could earn ne money as a large home battery. Oddly Renault give the V2L adapter with the Lithion ion 52 jwh battery but not with the LFP 40 kwh version where the LFP should be capable of several times more charge and discharge cycles !

Only £500 before paying tax on interest from savings if one is a higher rate tax payer. Interest rates on savings have been falling though one of my accounts with Lloyds still get 6.25%. One of the reasons I have ordered/buying the Renault 5 is that having savings,, after getting most of my tax free lump sum, is getting savings interests will just attract taxation so may as well spend and enjoy. Just trying to figure out if one get taxed on interest in a cash drawdown account. Sound have put it in ISA I suppose, I gather there is more than a third of a trillion pounds in ISAs, mostly cash ISAs !

Ah, as the 5p discount is still on diesel and petrol ie it is almost exactly 53p where it was 58p a litre i can see that ramping up maybe back to 58p a litre in 3 or 4 stages over the next 3 or 4 years so it does not add to inflation too much. Bonus us there would be more VAT collected as well as there is VAT on the Excise Duty. I thought the excise duty collected was around £25B a year but it will decline as more drivers move to EVs. It has held up around the £25B pa as car drivers moved from the more thermally and furl efficient diesel to the less polluting, ie NOX, petrol engined cars. I just have not heard of a workable pay per mile system. Increasingly EVs are getting their electricity from their home solar panel systems and trying to tax EVs is like trying to move water with a sieve.

Dealers not able to give much discount at all as Renault set the price pretty low to start with. Not even 'Blue Light" discount whereas there is with the Megane e which brings the buy price on the two cars within 5k or so and tge Megane e has much bigger battery and more power but the R5 is just so iconic and a really looker in many people's opinion and Renault are quickly selling any stock arriving at the docks. Not the case with the R4 i gather, Rebaukr should bring in the LFP version I reckon.

Front is fine it is the back seat area that is short on headroom as I am 6 foot 1 inch. I would have preferred a car that could have a drink and be put in the back and someone else drive but it seems that is not the R5 or R4, megane e is better but not great, not in tge league of the Scenic. Just have to use the R5 when not expecting for me or any other of the six footers in the family likely to need to go in the back or just take the Scenic if that scenario expected.

What is the 3% you quote above ? Seems to me about 10% of private cars being driven on the road are EVs and with van it seems even more from what I see. Registrations does not mean miles travelled on the road. As EVs are so cheap to run and tend to be newer vehicles drivers and companies gave acquired to do lots of miles and not relics for occasional outing though both are registered. I have ordered another EV today, European Car of the Year 2025 Renault 5, cheapest version though with the yellow paint, EV grant applied so thank you fellow tax payers for the financial bung !

A very very small group of people talk about Budget measures, a handful of politians abd a handful of civil servants from Revenue Directorate and none of them would talk as it would be the end of their careers. Pure speculation and pay per mile and charging higher VAT are none starters as taxes gave to be efficiently collectable which is why Excise Duty on disel and petrol are just so easy to collect as well as environmentally sound. 3% of fuel ie less than inflation sounds like sensible policy.

Be interested to see what the Twingo EV spec is, what size battery, LFP I would pressure. Dismd a good few miles in the petrol Twingo. Just don't leave your cool shopping items ib the boot to long as boot gets pretty warm with the engine just beneath the floor

Ordered a Renault 5 this morning, just the basic Evolution trim etc anymore the 40 kwh LFP battery. EV grant of course and a bit of discount and tapped in to 0% finance so can leave some money earning interest whilst paying sub £100 pm but largish 40% down. Only went for 8k miles a year as Scenic is the car for longer journeys and when carry more passengers. Disappointed with rear passenger space but front is nice and for a sub £22k car good quality i felt. Not as nice as son's Mini but quite acceptable. Gather Dacia Spring is getting 100 hp motor, it felt 'lively' with 65 hp, rolly and weird on those narrow small tyres. Hope they beef up the wheel and tyres. 18s on the '5'. Might have gone for PopGreen on the '5' but spec was not around so Pop Yellow it is, hate being billed for the non Green colour but it is striking. Glad it's LFP chemistry, forgot to ask if I get V2L adapter or if extra. Car already at Bristol Import Centre so should get early November when the much loved Zoe goes back to Renalt after 4 years of joy.

Express, Mail, Torygraph, GBNews, TalkTV ? Or an actual news source rather than political sewerage outlet ?

Not only an hour of free lecky this evening but 3 (three) hours tomorrow ie between noon and 3 pm, thank the sun and the air..... When is it time to go green ? Now..

Thought it did when did it before but of course one gets the reverse in the Spring when one loses an hour in the 0030 to 0530 GO Night period. One does not trust the Smart Meter as that is oft wrong. GO stated period on website etc just says 0030 to 0530, nothing about BST or GMT.

Two Octopus notable time slots coming up this weekend 24th -26th Octy. Free electricity 9pm to 10 pm tomorrow, the 24th of October and Dont forget the hour going back 2 am becoming 1 am means, with Octopus Go and perhaps other tariffs, an extra hour of 8.5p, 7p etc per kwh cheap lecky ! Get ready to fill you boots (ie batteries car and home)

The local Skoda dealership quoted nearly £1K so I got it done by an ex Skoda dealership that had moved over to selling Dacia and Renault and were very glad they did and they got lots of sales as those brands did so well in the last decade. I think the water pump was changed as well as the thermostat and it is quite common to replace the belt and tensioner also when doing the pump and thermostat. Modern, even small wiesel engines and so complex fort such a little engine. Think it might have been 105 hp, basically a 3 cylinder version of the 4 cylinder common rail version. Great mpg ie up to 80 mpg on a run. Glad I now live with a bunch of cars with much simpler mechanicals.

Indeed one system but the cylinder head is more of a sub system compared to the jacket. Clearly they have to be seperate and heads are removable from the jackets. The cooling water in the head will typically run 10c hotter than the cooling water in the jacket as the cylindef head has much more exposure to high temperatures. The cylinders are cooled by the oil as well as cooling water. Always a touch one as to which sub system to send the cooling water to first and which sub system, head or jacket first. What I do know it use to take me 10 minutes to change a thermostat and whole thing cost me about 10 quid. Now it requires about 3 hours work, told may as well change water pump as well whilst got engine apart and it cost me £800. Progress for another 5 mpg i gather !! One of the many reasons I went electric. Three times the efficiency less than a tenth of the complexity !

Presume you are referring to the cooling water. Modern cars have two cooling water circulatory systems, then there is the oil temp which starts at ambient but not unusually to hit a temp usually runs a bit higher than the water ie even above 200c at time of very high engine stress.

Yes quicker warm up for the higher temperatures but probably more NOX as that occurs more at higher combustion temperature. On our super massive marine diesels, most efficient ICE on the planet, a 1 degree rise in intake temp translated to a 2c rise in exhaust temp. NOX is more the concern than CO2 these days.

The new emmisson standard is going to test ICE cars at higher temperature, specifically at 35C rather than just 30C, temperatures we are seeing in the UK increasingly like we did here in Worcestcestershire a few weeks ago and similar in SE England. With Euro 7 the test us to include brake dust but this is just another area EVs will win hands down due to their regenerative braking. The only area EVs owners might be worried is tyre particles but, as we have shown with examples, EVs are not, in general, the super heavy weights painted in the bias media. Also a test for engines, and batteries, at high mileages. Yet another win for EVs. Whilst ICE vehicles will have leaking piston rings etc the EV motor etc just keep on knocking out similar power with no pollution from the power plant. As with the conditions of the EV grants if the battery falls to below 80 % capacity that is poor but even then the EV is usable and clean and not belching out massive pollution way outside its parameters like ICE would be. Fix might be relatively simple replacing the below par cell or pack.

Thankfully we are moving on and Euro6e BIS and Euro 7 use different conditions etc. I hope they retest many of these ICE cars that got Euro 6a to d certification of under 8p mg / km and their true levels of pollution are republished anfmd if they fail to meet the limits then they are restricted in where they can go. We saw lots if Euro 5 cars be sold off as they were not fit to enter city areas without paying fines and the same will happen to Euro 6 a to d cars that don't really pass the emissions test in the real world. PHEV hybrids are being reclassified from the wildly exaggerated 500 mpg plus and 10 gm / km of CO2 to more like 50 gm / km and pay the VED and BIK tax levels at those higher levels. This comes in in t months time I gather.

One problem with this is those with salaries between £50k and £100k are good at, and government make it easy to avoid paying the 40% income tax, and even the 2% NI levy. Even more so for those on 100k to 125k where the effective tax rate is over 50%. Make NI non exemptable from Salary Sacrifice would be a start.

Those are the Lab test results that car manufacturers made their cars perform within those limits. Real world tests, in the lower temperatures range of air intake and surrounding temperatures, rain water being sprayed off the road hitting the casing of the catalytic convertor showed the lab results could be out a factors of several multiples. Euro BIS abd Euro7 look to address the lab results against what tge emissions are in reality both at low higher ambient temperatures and high humidity and wet conditions and results of such tests are showing NOX as high as 6 and 7 times higher than than 60 for petrol and 80 mg/ km for diesel. I think this will be much of the motivation to restrict or ban Euro6d abd below from cities ie the real world pollution of Euro6d and below is often nowhere near where it should be. Diesels, petrol vehicles and hybrids will be not allowed unless it is a large battery PHEV than can use their electric drive and anyone use fossil fuel propulsion, detected by infrared cameras, will be fined substantially.