Does Govmt really care about road safety?

MrPudding

colm_mcm wrote:

You can't just get rid of VAT on anything that might save lives.

VRT is a tax on cars, and the number of airbags, availibility or ESP, adaptive cruise control, or any of these aren't and can't be a factor in a tax that is based on the seling price of a car.

If you import a car you go to see an inspector. You already have an estimate for the VRT based on the value the revenue believes the car is worth.

The inspector looks at your car. To the base price you already have he adds any luxury items present in your car he finds as he carries out the inspection.

My point is that items like ESP and additional airbags should not be classed as "luxury items" that is just silly.

I don't believe I suggested not paying VAT on safety items, only VRT. But now that you mention it it would be a good idea. How hard would it be? Not hard I suspect. I expect the car manufacturers have some idea of how much the equipment they install in their cars costs. I would think the hardest thing, which you have already elluded to, would be deciding what is a safety feature. I would suggest that ABS (obviously standard now but still a cost,) traction control, ESP, all airbags, impact protection systems, active head restraints, pre-tensioning seatbelts & ISOFIX fittings would be a good start. IMO they are 100% safety devices and as such the value of them should be subtracted from the open market price of cars for the purpose of calculating the VRT due. At the same time it would be easy enough so reduce the value pretax value of the car so no VAT was paid on it.

By the way, the reason I questioned your silly comment on VAT on food and people starving is because there is no VAT on basic staple foodstuffs, I was wondering if you actually knew that, obviously not. I guess the gov thinks food in important for most people so they don't tax it. You can check the revenue site to see for yourself.

MrP

colm_mcm

As far as I'm aware the government tax fire extinguishers, smoke alarms, intruder alarms, condoms, and some (but not all) food. these are all items that arguably prevent people from dying. but the tough reality is that the gov have to get their tax somewhere, and just because the item being taxed saves lives, it doesn't mean it should be exempt

MrPudding

Just because they currently tax the items you mention does not mean it is right to tax them. Fire extinguishers and smoke alarms should not, in my opinion, be taxed.

On the subject of food. Items like bread, milk, butter etc are not taxed because the gov see them as neessecities. It tells you this on the revenue site. I consider the items i mentioned in the previous post to be very important and think the government should see them as nessecities.

You seem to be taking a very simplistic view of this subject. You are of course right in what you are saying, if these items no longer attracted VRT or VAT then tax take for the government would fall. What you fail to take into account is that if they did not attract VAT or VRT these systems would be more like to appear on cars which currently do not have them. This would result in a reduction in incidents and death or injuries. These reductions would result in less cost to the governent for looking after those injured in incidents.

The EU estimates that having ABS as standard will save 15000 lives annually across europe, they did not release figures for the reduction in injuries. What cost would you put on this? ABS is installed on all cars but it is still a cost and still attracts VAT and VRT.

The fact of the matter is, if the government was interested they would at least look into it and do up the sums. I don't know but the net cost might actually be little or nothing. People die for a lot of reasons, a lot of them are beyond control. This woulkd actually be a pretty easy one.

MrP

colm_mcm

practically all new cars and vans have ABS as standard. ESP and multiple airbags are now filtering through to the smallest, cheapest cars. safety kit is becoming cheaper and cheaper. A far simpler way of making sure that cars became safer is to abolish VRT altogether, then lots of people would buy new cars, the used market would crash, and the people currently driving old bangers could buy cheap nearly new cars. not likely to happen though.

Curtain airbags for example on a well known mid sized car are a €365 option. around €75 or that is VRT. If the price of this option suddenly drops to €290, do you think anyone is going to care?