Clean Air Zone = ZTT going! What next?
 

Hi all...
Sad times... thanks to the Birmingham Clean Air Zone coming into force in June next year, our ZTT's days are numbered. We've owned the car for 10 years and it has been fantastic, with regular maintenance and few big bills it has been cheap to own and a great do-it-all car for the family. I'm loathed to get rid of it because it has years of good service left in it I'm sure. It has only recently had clutch and flywheel, brakes and tyres!

We need something to replace it, and I'm struggling to pick something as I know very little about any other marque. Whatever we buy will be with us for a long time as we don't tend to change cars very often. It must be an estate, it must be petrol, the budget can't be too extravagant (possibly £5k), it must be reliable and not hugely expensive to repair if it does need work.

I know nobody has a crystal ball to see if a car will be a good buy or not but does anyone have any personal experience they can share on long term ownership of anything that's a suitable replacement?

Hope you can all give me some food for thought!

Cheers
Jim

I have never been able to own the cars I have adored since schooldays, never had a garage big enough, and drive long enough.

When I can no longer obtain/own a decent CDTi, I will not bother, just use SWMBOs motor. Rover, although a joy as always, is just the best of the rest.

Good luck in choosing, but to me all other motors are just transport.

Would never live in a town or city, my food for thought would be...
Move.

I feel for you - I am lucky to have no big cities near me, and have no intention of visiting any. Still, they don't want city centres to die!

Not sure your £5k budget will suffice. The price of second-hand let alone new cars scares the pants off me! Sorry I cannot really offer any bright ideas.

Just keep the car and if you really need to visit these car hating places , just use park and ride or public transport. Reliable and cheap to repair doesn’t exist on modern green’ cars !

:wot:

This makes sense Jim. Keep your ZT-T for the Birmingham suburbs and for touring the UK. Use public transport if you need to go into Birmingham city centre. :D

Simon

Skoda octiva? I’ve driven loads of hire cars and those seem reasonable amongst the bland. BMW tourers are nice to drive, but obviously expensive. Would a n/a 1.8 75 or ZT pass the emission regs? :shrug:

Hi Jim. Sorry to hear this. If you decide to sell, let me know. I did drop you a PM also.

I can highly recommend the Octavia, lots of car for your money and the boot is huge - bigger than an A6 infact! If petrol, the 1.4 is a good option or depending if you want sporty the 2.0 is great in vRS guise. Although probably out of budget. For your budget I’d recommend a 1.6 after 2015, any diesel before this will be Euro 5 and not meet your needs for ULEZ.

To complicate things, avoiding the city centre is not possible, as it's where I work. I cannot take public transport as an alternative because as a train driver, I AM the public transport! I regularly drive to and from work well outside of any convenient timetable for train or bus. There's always a push bike I guess :)

The budget may be unrealistic, I accept that. It will increase a bit if needed. I have briefly been looking at something only a couple of years old in Octavia/Superb format, but the prices scare me! When I am balancing this purchase against saving for an early retirement I think I will find it hard to write a cheque for north of £20k for something I fancy rather than something that will do. We bought the ZTT after selling a 620ti, and it had high mileage of 107k (now 200k) but was cheap at £3100 (though 10 years ago, as I mentioned).

What would they charge you if you use your car?

Hi maybe a petrol estate with lpg conversion ?.
Lpg conversion isn't really expensive .you could be all in with buying a V6 new cam belt lpg conversion for about £3000 including buying the car

Honda Jazz..
Then when you've stopped laughing have a look at the specs... 2008 on would suit and ULEZ friendly..

Cheers Ian

The simple answer is to avoid all the places that are charging us to use our cars, I’m sick of all the excuses re ‘clean air’ or ‘low emission’

Why don’t they target all the fossil fueled power stations across the globe?

(Easier to target the motorist for some more money for the coffers)

£8 per day. If I start one day and finish after midnight, whether that's two charges for that shift is as yet unclear.

Sorry to hear about this. I think Brum is the only City to be staying with the Emissions thing. As far as I know all the others have shelved the idea because of the present COVID issues.

I dallied with a different marque and bought a 2008 VW Passat with the 1.9 PD engine that's good for stellar mileages.

Solid, efficient, bland and boring - It'll be going soon as I've just bought another 75 :D.

If it's dependable transport you're after look at the Toyota Avensis.

We've had a Carina then an Avensis, both petrol, and they just went on, and on, and on....

A possible alternative is a Mazda 6 but avoid the diesels. SWMBO has a little petrol Mazda 2. Awesome thing for reliability. Now 10 years old and approaching 110K and the only non service item in the last 7 years is a brake switch :bowdown:.

Good Luck with the search.

Andy.

If you want a view across the market, use the filters on Autotrader. Don't specify a brand, but put in petrol, estate, the amount you want to pay, auto or manual or both and any other must have you can think of and you'll get a list of all the cars for sale that meet your spec. You may get some ideas to explore that way,

Another thought: is buying a cheap to run and, hopefully, cheap to buy, fairly modern city car an option for your budget? That would cover your commute, and you can use the Z for longer journeys away from the city centre and the LEZ...

How about going for something electric for the work journeys, and keep the ZTT for everything else? If you've got somewhere to charge it at home.

Other than a G-WIZ I can think of any 2nd hand electric car that would fit into the OP’s stated (£5000) budget.

I found a few on autotrader. Nissan Leaf, Citroen zero, peugeot ion, Renault fluenze, and for a little over £5000 there’s the Renault Zoe.

I did out of interest do a quick insurance quote though and the ones I tried were more expensive on insurance than the ZT!

I don't know if any Skoda offerings have a Skoda engine as I don't take much notice of this type of thing nowadays. Skoda was/is a VAG partner and virtually exclusively used VAG engines (as I say, things might be different now). Thus your seemingly Euro 5 engine might easily turn out to be Euro 3 (the great VAG magic wand). The good news (bad news for me) is that the UK government(s) have not re-categorised any of the VAG "clean" engines to the correct "dirty".

Kev

You can always e-mail Grant Shapps; he's got lovely non-committal reply to all subjects. Mention the cost of the albatross HS2.

Kev

I was reading about the millions of "dieselgate" cars still on UK roads :eek: the other week, Clientearth has issued a legal request asking six Type Approval Authorities in the EU & UK why these cars are still on the road & they have 60 days to reply before legal action. :eek: https://www.clientearth.org/press/di...-manipulation/

We must thank the Americans for bringing this cover-up to the full light of day and ask why Eton Cameron did not do the correct and moral action(s) needed to re-categorise and thus stop likely subterfuge in the future.

Thanks also should go to the people who are prepared to join class actions - I've seen the tv ad asking for buyers of diesel Mercs (certain date period) if they would like to join a class action. Mind you, if re-categorisation had happened there would have been a volcano of fury if diesel owners were asked to cough up another £100 - £200 in VED.

Kev

Yes, I remember that the original private partner jacked their hand in and had to pay (was it?) £330 million to Brummie council. Is there not some major athletics/sporting event in the very near future which the council wanted every road perfect before the event?

Kev

Never realised that you could get a normal fully electric vehicle for under £5K.

The advertising for electric cars seems to gloss over higher insurance costs .

Isn't the issue that they might be nearing the end of battery life and they'll be early models with very low battery range anyway. So a buyer might have to factor in buying a new battery, which is presumably a costly item.

As to pollution levels, the UK is a windy place and usually that keeps pollution levels low, but when there are periods of light or no wind (high pressure) then city pollution can build up very quickly to dangerous levels.

Where abouts in Birmingham do you live? I ask because the 82 bus stops right outside New Street.

Sutton. Buses not an option as I regularly start work before any meaningful bus timetable is up and running. Same for late at night when finishing on late shift.

Good idea on the tailored autotrader search! I will certainly do that.

Lexus/Toyota seemingly always at the top of used car reliability surveys, Mondeo not far behind with the benefit of cheap parts if it does go wrong. Skoda would be a bit dull if not a VRS but a sensible choice, and there's plenty of them now, maybe even a higher mileage mk3 car in budget or very nearly.

The search continues :)

As punitive as these charges seem to be towards car drivers I do believe it is a necessary step towards the inevitable cessation of the production of internal combustion engines. Slowly squeezing people out of more heavily polluting cars does go some way towards inproving air quality in towns and cities where they are more concentrated. Of course not every day produces high pollution numbers, it doesn't work like that. But when it's bad, it's bad. This is about encouraging people to take up electric vehicles which they will have to do anyway by 2040 or whenever it is. Slowly the prices of these cars will come down and the investment in their infrastructure will increase, and right now we are managing the tipping of the scales. All the recycling we will ever need will be solved by energy production, hopefully solar. If people would just stop burying it in the ground!

Have a go and see just how difficult it is to try and find out the true environmental impact of building a car before it even turns a wheel on the road.

You start the journey from digging the minerals etc. out of the ground but all we ever hear about is how wonderful they are when they're driving around saving the planet.

Maybe there's some vested interests in play somewhere.

And how is HM Govt going to recover all the lost ££££'s in car tax/fuel tax etc. I wonder :shrug:

For which new nuclear power stations are being built which have their own brand of pollution: highly dangerous radioactive waste which needs to be stored for thousands of years. And when something goes wrong as it did at Windscale and Chernobyl?

I can appreciate the advantages of electric cars though, once the charging problem has been sorted out. They also have the advantage of keeping the wheels of commerce turning. I'd like to see leisure craft for hire on our rivers and canals abandon diesel engines for electric traction but that wouldn't attract many votes at the general election. ;)

Simon

I would also gen up on battery life expectancy and cost of replacement plus cold weather performance.

Kev

Met up with my ex MD a couple of years ago, he was a member of the institute of electro mechanical engineers.
He told me he was looking at a Nissan Leaf, but when he really quizzed the salesman he was told to expect a winter mileage of under 100 miles per full charge.

I did some research into replacing a Leaf battery pack, comes out in the region of £5000.

There are estimates around but they seem to be based on differing criteria such as main electrical costs (cheap in China).
True them Greenies never mention the start of things but by heavens them dumper trucks are true men toys!
Oh yes and how! If the industry is intrinsic to your whatever country you name and is a major employer of people then they will exert influence in whatever way they can
[/quote]
Don't work those worry beads, the govt will find ways - perhaps a road mileage tax?

regards, Kev

Only environmentally savings once you reach 50,000 miles according to Volvo, by which time the battery will be on its last legs!!

Thanks for that confirmation and insight. The majority of people will realise too late when stuck in traffic, in a snow storm that amber reading for the usual journey was not sufficient as only 60% was really available.

Kev

Another good pointer Mr. Coolguy! But no future negatives please ;-)

Kev

There will never be zero impact on the environment when it comes to technology, especially cars. There's always clean up to be done, some ways will be cleaner than others, and electric vehicle technology has the potential for far easier waste management in the future coupled with a fuel source that has the potential to be 100% renewable. Internal combustion just doesn't have that, it is dirty and finite.

Unlimited 'free' energy will make waste recycling far easier in the form or solar, but nuclear is a comparitively low impact method of generation. Nuclear waste has its own issues obviously, but with space vehicle technology improving why not fire it into the sun?!

Electric vehicles and battery technology are at the start of their technology curve at the moment, who knows where they will be, and how recyclable and reusable their components will be etc in 50 years time. People won't embrace the technology if you ask then nicely, you have to force them, through legislation and monetary means. People banging on about how NAUGHTY WORD-NAUGHTY WORD-NAUGHTY WORD-NAUGHTY WORD- the range is... well, of course it is! Did you think car manufacturers didn't design and manufacture their first generation of electric vehicles with the best available technology? People want a straight swap for diesel range and they wanted it yesterday. Patience! This is for future generations not ours.

It's difficult to believe that this planet isn't screwed anyway, given the numbers of people living on it. It's an exercise in slowing things down now and stopping us all choking to death before we've sorted free, clean energy for eveyone.

A suggestion for you if you are looking for a petrol car with space.
I bought my Peugeot 308 SW a year ago and it’s done 15,000 faultless miles already. Paid £3500 for a 62 plate estate with a good history. It swallows up 2 sets of alloy wheels with the seats folded. I’ve had a tow bar fitted to pull my trailer and it tows well.
Ok it’s a diesel but it made enough impression to make me look for a petrol version for my wife.
The petrol version is ULEZ friendly and will return 45 mpg on a long run. Very spacious and well screwed together. I pay £228 insurance and VED is £125 per year. Diesel is as low as £30 per annum which is ironic as it’s the “dirty” car!
There is lots of choice out there so take a long look.

I can see the tipping point coming before 2030! Mercedes have just announced they're culling their ICE's (Internal Combustion Engines) by 70% & manual gearboxes to save money & re-tool their engine/transmission plants for electrification :eek: https://www.iol.co.za/motoring/indus...d-b2dd3a956dc2 There is a new carbon tax across EU countries from the 1st January 2021, Germany has already voted to raise petrol, diesel & even heating oil with 'green taxes' and as we mirror & underpin the EU standards it's expected in the UK too. https://www.thesun.ie/news/6016866/b...rease-ireland/

Whilst understanding the need for clean running engines, i really love it when
these law makers who are all on massive public purse salaries driving the latest vehicles (paid for by us all) start enforcing these green laws that have no effect on themselves at all.

Nothing changes, its always been like that!

Problem is as soon as electric cars become popular the powers that be will start charging more for the electricity, since they'll be taking a financial beating once less and less people start visiting the pumps. And lets not forget the demand for more charging ports will put more strain on the coal fired power stations, meaning the risk of potential brownouts will go up.

Well of course they will... it's called an economy. Did you want it all for free?

When we get to the point where many more people are commuting in electric cars the vast majority will be charging them up over night (perhaps incentivised by cheaper rate electricity) thus spreading the demand. Or, again, battery technology for home storage of solar energy. It already exists, electric car battery packs being repurposed for use in the home, extending their life before they do need to be remanufactured.

No, but neither do I want to choose between eating or heating, because the rise in electricity bills will mean I wouldn't be able to do both.

That is the point some of us posters are making in the story of diesel vs petrol. Gordon Brown in his effort to save the world and to make the UK carbon neutral by the next day for the Kyoto shindig. Both forms of emissions are bad for humans (certainly in higher volumes) but I recon NOX is much worse than co2.

Brown obviously never attended a science class and thus encouraged people to purchase NOX emitters by putting them into lower VED bands.
When the whole scam of diesel emissions was bust open by the Americans(like an euro 3 engine suddenly able to be categorised as Euro 5 after the "necessary" engine emission research) the diesel car should have been re-banded. It would have been simpler to have just the one list of bands again (say the mean of diesel VED and petrol VED).

There is now no logic in this discriminatory action.

Baah, humbug

Kev

They’re the older models, but yes, they can be that cheap.


At least 2 of the ones I saw were where you rent the battery, so I believe you don’t have to pay for a new one when it’s dead. And the lack of monthly tax would go some way to covering the cost of the rental. Range was around 100 miles I think on the Renault, which as a 2nd car for city driving to work should be fine. Savings on fuel and tax, and emissions charges, should outweigh anything g else.

Just to add, I’m still not convinced on electric cars in general, but for city driving, if you’ve got the space for a charger, I can see the benefit.

You won't be paying more for your electricity because of electric cars if you don't have an electric car, any more than you're asked to pay fuel duty if you don't own a car at all. I imagine there will be different tariffs, and you will still pay for what you use. This may or may not go hand-in-hand with tolls for road use. Again you pay for what you use.

At the moment energy tariffs can be and are incentivised to encourage uptake of electric cars. A colleague of mine owns a BMW i3 which he charges at home, and his energy provider switched him to a tariff for users of electric vehicles and his annual bill went DOWN by nearly £400. He's basically charged it all year for free!

You won't be paying more for your electricity because of electric cars if you don't have an electric car, any more than you're asked to pay fuel duty if you don't own a car at all. I imagine there will be different tariffs, and you will still pay for what you use. This may or may not go hand-in-hand with tolls for road use. Again you pay for what you use.

At the moment energy tariffs can be and are incentivised to encourage uptake of electric cars. A colleague of mine owns a BMW i3 which he charges at home, and his energy provider switched him to a tariff for users of electric vehicles and his annual bill went DOWN by nearly £400. He's basically charged it all year for free!

Will the £8 per day include if you have to travel in and out of the area several times a day, those that are going or thinking of having there wheels refurbished at CPC add the price above to the cost of the wheels then :shrug:

It will be a daily charge. If you go past a camera once or a dozen times as long as you've paid for that day you're ok.

What's not clear at the moment is if you start work at 1700 and finish at 0100 is that two charges for two days or is it a rolling 24hr period you've paid for? It makes no difference if I go back to work the following day, but over a week of the same shift this means I'll effectively pay for an extra day at the end of the week that I haven't really used, and increase my weekly/monthly/annual emissions charge payments by 25%.

Blimey! the French are upping the Ante and stopping trade-in incentives for diesel engined cars & petrol engined cars made after 2010 :eek: from the start 1st January 2021 https://www.fr24news.com/a/2020/10/f...l-engines.html