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London Clean-Air Proposals May Affect Owners of Diesel-Powered Vehicles

Most London citizens know Mayor Boris Johnson. He replaced Ken Livingstone back in 2008 and even dropped a 1 minute 57.4-second lap on a very wet Top Gear test track in the old Chevrolet Lacetti sedan. That Boris is waging war on diesel cars with an upcoming change in the Congestion Charge plan.
Low Emissions Zone sign 1 photo
Photo: http://www.tfl.gov.uk/
According to the British media, Johnson will announce tonight if a supplementary £10 will hike the Congestion Charge of passenger vehicles past the threshold £20 mark. With the current daily charge at £11.50 for vehicles that produce more than 75 grams of C02 per kilometer, things will get pretty dramatic if the price hike is applied. Moreover, diesel-fuelled cars might be affected by another element.

Boris Johnson is expected to lobby the British government in order to raise the road tax of oil burning vehicles. Why? Well, The Times says it's an effort to persuade drivers to ditch their current vehicles for cleaner, gasoline-fed or hybrid automobiles. Don't know about you, but that sounds like a case of motoring discrimination, especially when you take into account that modern diesels are pretty clean and almost 50 percent of cars registered in the U.K. are running on diesel.

Cash cow scheme or not, if London imposes a £21.5 daily Congestion Charge, we have a sneaking suspicion that other big cities from the United Kingdom might draw up their own Low Emission Zone tax to please the European Commission knobs that come up with increasingly dramatic clean air rules.
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About the author: Mircea Panait
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After a 1:43 scale model of a Ferrari 250 GTO sparked Mircea's interest for cars when he was a kid, an early internship at Top Gear sealed his career path. He's most interested in muscle cars and American trucks, but he takes a passing interest in quirky kei cars as well.
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