Here we go again — yet another attack on the older car and its owner.
Some desk jockey in ACC, doubtless with a fully air-bagged and taxpayer-provided ‘company car’, has come up with the idea that Accident Compensation levies — the major component of the annual registration costs of any car — should reflect the individual vehicle’s ‘star rating’ in crash tests. Daft as it is, it appears as though his/ her political masters (comfortable in their taxpayer-provider cars) failed to see the joke and haven’t actually rejected the idea out of hand.
Since these ratings have only existed for a very few years, the effect of this desk driver’s bright idea can only be that our ‘zero-star’ classics would face the highest of the charges levied, and this despite being the cars which probably travel the lowest distances and must therefore represent one of the lowest-risk sections of the country’s car fleet.
Classic owners are among the lowest risk takers on the road, as I am quite sure the specialist insurers of classic cars would be able to confirm.
I may be a simple fellow — my wife reckons so anyway — but it appears to me that the mere fact of being on the road, with its attendant idiots, is the real risk, and if that is so then it follows that that risk must be almost directly proportionate to the time spent out there. In turn that is proportionate to the distance covered and therefore to the fuel consumed.
Would it not make sense therefore to forget all about the ACC levy on registration, and transfer the entire levy requirement onto the cost of fuel?
Interestingly I was recently involved in a survey at a couple of local railway station car parks, and on the day in question about two per cent of cars were unregistered — they weren’t paying any ACC levies at all under the current system, but a fuel levy would have seen them paying their share, whether they liked it or not.
So what’s wrong with that idea?