Originally Posted by nick46

Personally I think the whole thing is total bollocks! And the comment about people being sheep is bang on.
People seem to have very short memories. Remember a few short years ago before catalytic converters, dpf's, fuel injection, unleaded fuel etc - walking down the street getting covered in black smoke from buses and lorries, breathing in the smell of petrol fumes and two stroke fumes. Vehicle emissions back then were rather dirty (although the smell of two stroke was good!), but I don't remember people keeling over left right and centre and dying. In fact I don't think I know anyone who has died as a result of vehicle emissions.
Technology has come on a long way and vehicles burning petrol and diesel these days are, I believe pretty much as clean as they're gonna get (which is a good thing). I think I might be correct in saying that today you would even struggle to kill yourself by connecting a hose to your exhaust and running it in to the car. The car would probably run out of petrol before you die! However, I stand to be corrected if I'm wrong.
Anyway, my point is that I believe it's all about money and revenue for the government. Over the years I would say revenue from road tax and fuel has fallen. Remember when four star petrol was bad and we all had to switch to unleaded which was nice and clean! Unleaded was cheaper - less tax revenue. Then remember when unleaded was bad and diesel was nice and clean! Everyone switched to diesel cos it was cheaper than petrol and the road tax was cheaper - less revenue! To combat this the government hiked up the tax on diesel fuel to make it more expensive than petrol, but as you get more mpg from a diesel you use less of it. Now everyone is buying cars that are free to tax or £30 or so, that is even less revenue. Remember, it wasn't that long ago when it cost us all somewhere in the region of £150 -£200 a year to tax our cars. So guess what, now there are so many diesel cars on the road generating not as much revenue for the government, diesel is now bad and is gonna kill us all! Great excuse to hammer the diesel owner.
Then in a few years when we've all switched to electric cos that's 'clean' and cheap, that will become bad and dirty due to all the things that goes into making batteries and all the power stations belching out nasty emissions so we can charge them up.
In my view as always, the motorist and the whole industry is an easy target when it comes to getting people to behave like lemmings and to generate some cash when it's needed.
Well that's my view anyway!