Goodbye little car, I just can't afford to keep you.

Today, is a sad day. I have had to wave goodbye to my little car Pelle.

I have only had him since last October, but this faithful little car has been in my family for quite a few years. I would have kept the car running, because there were no known engine problems, but the increasing costs of fuel, and the sky high taxes, are two of the reasons that I can not continue to keep him going. At the end of this month my road tax is due to expire, and I received the letter requesting another tax payment earlier this month, I can tell you, my eyes nearly fell out of my head. £120 for 6 months, and £230 For a full year. Add insurance on to that (£600+), and then fuel at around £40 every two weeks. That's an estimated £1,900 every year, for a 15 year old car. My car was actually an automatic transmission, so drank a little more fuel than a manual transmission.

Lets compare the costs, Martin's car a Hyundai i20, has a road tax label of £30 pounds per year, and the fuel costs are around £60 every two weeks (with a heck of a lot more mileage), and insurance is around £800 for both of us. That adds up to an estimated £2,130. Which is more but if you think that this car is used much more, then the costs are actually much less. I would get 200 miles from a £40 tank of fuel, whereas Martin's car gets 200 miles out of a £20 half tank of fuel. So if we worked that out it would be approximately £1,350, or £1,150 for me, with my lower insurance because I am a girl. Which is also unfair in my opinion.

Okay, so for someone like me a Hyundai i20, would be a much more affordable option. Fantastic! I have chosen a car!!! Lets just throw a spanner in the works here, and look at the buying costs. My car cost me £200 to buy, Martin's was.... £7,500. So, really it's fair to say that the average young person in the UK can not afford to buy a nice shiny new, or young car. So we are forced to buy a cheaper, older car, with higher taxes and fuel consumption.

Insurance is through the roof, as young people are apparently terrible drivers, who all rocket around at over 100/mph. Yeah right, ok. Most of the accidents that I have ever witnessed, have been caused by an older driver and many caused by elderly drivers. This is because the elderly have slower reactions, and they can have poor eyesight. This being said, I do know of many, very good elderly drivers. The older drivers (from 30 - 70 years) can be awful drivers too, taking chances, and bullying younger drivers, causing more, dangerous situations than all of the young drivers that I know. This may be taken as biased, but I am merely writing the facts of my observations. It may well be a fact that younger drivers are involved in more accidents, but younger drivers are inexperienced and may not know how to react to being cut up, pulled out in front of, sudden braking, pedestrians, etc... In fact I very nearly had someone pull out into the side of me at a roundabout yesterday, and she was a 30 something!

My main aggravation. is that I feel that young people are being priced out of driving, we can't afford the greener cars, so have to suffer the higher taxes, we get driven into by bespectacled grannies, so have higher insurance. It is a vicious cycle.

I am not that angry about the higher taxes, when I think that the taxes are higher for more polluting cars, because I am a very eco-concious person. I would love to walk everywhere, but the fact is that I live in a small sub-urban village, which only has a handful of highly priced shops and only one bank. The closest towns are Rayleigh (2 miles) and Rochford (2 miles), both of which I could walk to, and will, but I couldn't go to the nearest supermarket (4 miles).  For me a car is quite essential, especially for work, because there is nothing in this tiny little village! We have two buses that come once an hour (If we are lucky). A train station, but the train is over priced and doesn't go where I want to go. That is all we have. Not great.

Really, I think that the government should stop pricing young people out of driving, and if they really wanted us to drive greener cars then they should give us heavy subsidiaries and incentives to do so.  I actually read somewhere the other day that around half of modern cars do not pass their first MOT. Food for thought? Insurance companies should not price young people and their parents out of driving as I truly believe that it is the extortionate costs of the compulsory insurance, actually makes people drives illegally without insurance. We are in a monetary crisis, no one can afford to do anything, I can't even afford to get a job. If I was weaker of mind, then I would certainly have checked out of life by now.

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