What fun it is watching again all those smug Volkswagen ads on YouTube, featuring men in mid-life crisis revving up their Golfs and Passats. German carmakers vie with French farmers for their sacred status in the European Union. That it has taken US authorities to sniff out the company’s cheating on emissions tests doesn’t say much for European environmental law, which is good at telling us we can only have low-powered kettles, but apparently unable to sniff out high emissions from overpowered diesel cars.
But the VW scandal isn’t just a story of corporate turpitude. It is part-product of an environmental policy in Britain as much as across the EU which has become fixated on carbon emissions to the exclusion of virtually everything else. Diesels have grown to account for just under half the UK car market thanks to changes the Blair government made to vehicle excise duty. From 2001, punitive rates of up to £500 were applied to cars which emit carbon emissions of more than 225g/km, while cars below 120 g/km were treated to token road-tax rates.
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