budanters

UK car taxation/costs (part 1 - tax)

2010-04-11T21:03:00.009+01:00

I thought it might be interesting to have a look at the cost of the UK's car-related taxation, and see the benefits of going for high effiecency cars.

I took two typical small cars: a Peugeot 107 Urban and a Ford Fiesta 1.4 Studio.

Peugeot 107 1.0 Urban 3-door
MPG 62
Insurance Grp 1
CO2 Emissions 106g/km
Road Tax Band B
Price £8,470*

Ford Fiesta 1.4 Studio
MPG 49
Insurance Grp 4
CO2 Emissions 133g/km
Road Tax Band E
Price £13,395*

*prices taken from their respective main website.

It is probably clear from the differing list price that the two might not be directly comparable in terms of quality, but it is still interesting to see what the effect of the extra fule efficency of the Peugeot has on cost.

The extra efficency will obviously give some saving on petrol costs. Currently main road fuels (i.e. unleaded petrol and diesel) have a fuel duty tax which is paid per litre. As of 01-Apr-2010 this was £0.5719/litre. VAT is then added ontop of the fuel and fuel duty cost.

Today (11-Apr-2010) my local supermarket was selling unleaded petrol at £1.18/litre (£0.18 VAT, £0.57 Fuel Duty, £0.43 Fuel).

In addition to the savings on fuel, there will be a saving on the annual Road Tax.

To further promote the purchase of fuel efficent cars, there is a further first year road tax incentive. Any car with CO2 emission of 130g/km or less gets the first year of road tax for free.

So with a few simply assumptions I have calculated the amount of tax paid over a 5 year period for both cars:

	Peugeot 107	Ford Fiesta 1.4
VAT	£1,261.49	£1,995.00
Road Tax Yr 1	£0.00	£110.00
Road Tax Yr 2	£20.00	£110.00
Road Tax Yr 3	£20.00	£110.00
Road Tax Yr 4	£20.00	£110.00
Road Tax Yr 5	£20.00	£110.00
Fuel VAT Yr 1	£127.42	£163.05
Fuel VAT Yr 2	£129.58	£165.81
Fuel VAT Yr 3	£129.58	£165.81
Fuel VAT Yr 4	£129.58	£165.81
Fuel VAT Yr 5	£129.58	£165.81
Fuel Duty Yr 1	£414.65	£530.58
Fuel Duty Yr 2	£427.41	£546.91
Fuel Duty Yr 3	£427.41	£546.91
Fuel Duty Yr 4	£427.41	£546.91
Fuel Duty Yr 5	£427.41	£546.91

Total Tax Paid	£4,111.53	£6,089.52

I have assumed each car does 10,000 miles per year. I have kept the fuel price the same each year, but for years 2 to 5 I have factored in the annouced increase of fuel duty to £0.5895/litre which occurs on 01-Jan-2011.

Andrew Graham-Dixon

2010-01-06T01:15:00.001Z

If it is still available on iPLayer than Andrew Graham-Dixon's recent series on the history of art in Spain is excellent.

http://www.andrewgrahamdixon.com/

Adding multiple column calculations to ActiveScaffold

2009-10-24T14:05:00.006+01:00

Recently I have been making great use of the excellent ActiveScaffold for a Ruby on Rails project I have been hired to create.

ActiveScaffold (AS) makes it really easily to do a calculation on the columns, for example displaying the average of a column. In your controller you just need to do:

active_scaffold :sale do |config|
config.columns[:product_profit].calculate = :avg
end

However my client wanted both averages and totals at the bottom, so From reading the documentation and a quick web search it didn't look to be a pre-built way to do this, so I had to look at customising the ActiveScaffold.

I wanted to be able to set calculate the standard way with a single option, or have an array of options:

config.columns[:chassis_profit].calculate = :avg
-or-
config.columns[:chassis_profit].calculate = [:sum, :avg]

The answer was to be found in vendor/plugins/active_scaffold/frontends/default/views/_list_calculations.html.erb. This file was responsible for calling the caluation and displaying the result. The chosen calculation option was accessable via column.calculate. I needed a way to handle both single values and arrays. The following code allowed me to iterate over an array, but still works if column.calculate was a single value:

<% for calculation_type in [*column.calculate] -%>
column.calculate = calculation_type
<% end -%>

As I looped over the array I set column.calculate to each single value, so I did not affect the way AS worked.

Things to look at

2009-10-23T00:47:00.000+01:00

http://www.flickr.com/photos/timferriss/2919230853/in/set-72157607796715778/
http://www.dolectures.com/brainfood/

Some thoughts to flesh out

2009-10-23T00:26:00.003+01:00

Adding win states and game-like mechanics into stuff to postively encourage peoples actions (for example: visible energy usage meters, displaying current MPG in cars, points & badges in software). This idea seems to have the potential to be very powerful.
If you yourself want to make a positive impact and a meaningful footprint on the world, you need to recruit people that will also take action. You need to be offering those people a compelling goal, one that will also offer them the oppurtunity to be part of history. Your goal, your message needs to be clear.
Retail anchor tenants (i.e. you have a new shopping centre and literally pay a big brand to move in). Again seems a powerful idea if transposed into other fields.

More books

2009-10-10T23:00:00.002+01:00

There seems to be a theme with many of the books I really enjoy. They give you some insight into things really are; just science and figures, no fluff.

My recent TV viewing

2009-09-26T13:44:00.007+01:00

The Love of Money
Three part documnetary about the recent financial crisis:
1/3. Why the collapse of Lehman Brothers had disastrous consequences for the world's economy.
2/3. Examining the boom years before the global crash, with testimony from key decision makers.
3/3. The story of how politicians reacted to the crash, and what has been learnt from it.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00mqmjs/episodes/player

Alone in the Wild
http://www.channel4.com/programmes/alone-in-the-wild/4od

Nigel Slater's Simple Suppers
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00mm51f/episodes/player

Economy Gastronomy
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00m1c34

Jamie's American Road Trip
Jamie Oliver tours parts of America not often seen on TV and enjoys some of the unique food

Jonathan Meades: Off Kilter
1/3. Architecture critic Jonathan Meades takes a quixotic tour of Scotland.
2/3. On the isle of Lewis and Harris, Meades discovers serenity, Calvinism and peat bog bodies.
3/3. Meades celebrates an oil refinery and takes potshots at overpaid footballers.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00mrbdt

Peep Show - Season 6
http://www.channel4.com/programmes/peep-show/4od

Asus 1005HA

2009-08-29T21:02:00.001+01:00

Book Recommendations

2009-08-07T12:58:00.010+01:00

A few excellent books worth reading:

The Science of Cooking, by Peter Barham
If you watch a few TV cooking programmes you will hear often repeated rules without any explanantion, "sear your steak first", "always sieve flour". If this ever gives you the pestering thought of, "Why?", then this is the book for you.

The Unfolding of Language, by Guy Deutscher
Absolutely superb! Gives you a great insight into why language changes and how it develops; why irregularites come about, and shows how fundamental metaphor is to any language.

The Selfish Gene

Running Rails 'on' Windows

2009-03-14T13:55:00.004Z

I have been developing a Rails app on my aging Windows 2000 desktop PC since 2006. Luckily this PC has been trouble-free, so only ever had to get Ruby and Rails installed and working once.

Recently I decided that I should really move off an operating system that is nearly a decade old, and jump head-first into the modern world.

I dusted off my 7 year old Windows XP CD and popped it into my computer.

With my fresh new computer, I had a number of unsuccesful attempts at getting Rails working. I tried the Ruby One-Click Installer, but had a few problems when I updated to the latest version of Gems.

After some random searching I happened upon a great answer over at StackOverflow. The suggestion was to run Rails on a linux virtual machine. So that's what I did ...

1. Installed VirtualBox 2.1.4
Easy!

2. Installed virtual machine Ubuntu Server 8.10
This is pretty easy, you just download the ISO from the Ubuntu site, in VirtualBox you create a new machine, and point it at the ISO.

3. Install Ruby & Rails
This was trouble free, I just followed the steps of this screencast over at O'Reilly Blogs.

At this point I made a decision that I would continue to do my actual coding in Windows and with an IDE (shhh, don't tell anybody or I'll get kicked out of the Rails community). I had previously used Eclipse with Ruby Development Tools and Subclipse plugins. This had served me well, but I recently had the opportunity to try NetBeans and liked it, so decided to go with this.

This meant the next stage was to have some sort of common file area between the Host and the Virtual Machine. I could of setup Samba on Ubuntu, but VirtualBox provides the feature of Shared Folders, which allows the guest operating systems access to folders on the Host.

4a. Setup Shared Folders
(a little bit of pain, more details to follow)

4b. Installed the VirtualBox Guest Additons in the the Ubuntu Server.
(a little bit of pain, more details to follow)

5. Configured port forwarding
There are number of networking options with VirtualBox, the default is NAT with the guests inside their own private network and VirtualBox doing NAT. This gives the guest easy access to the Internet, however it's services won't be accessible by the Host. The easiest option seems to be stick with NAT and configure port forwarding as per the instructions here.