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UK could raise nearly £2bn by taxing SUVs in line with European countries, study shows
(www.theguardian.com)
Do it
this post was submitted on 16 Sep 2025
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More sloppy reporting from the guardian, at least proof read the work. Tax £66,610 on an £85,000 vehicle? 3 times as much as the cost in the uk of £3200? I think someone put another 0 on that, and they still managed to publish it.
I don't think a small typo counts as sloppy reporting
I'm not sure what the mistake is? France charge a £50k premium, so £66k tax doesn't sound unreasonable.
It doesn't say that that £66k is 3 times the cost, it says there are 13 countries which have a greater acquisition tax than 3x the UK rate. As far as I can see, it doesn't mention the relative costs between the UK and France.
If it’s mean to be a single digit multiple of the uk tax, at 3k, then it can’t be 66k
It's not meant to be a single digit multiple of the UK tax, I don't know where you're getting that from. The things which the article mentions as being single digit multiples are:
In 13 countries, acquisition taxes for such an SUV are more than three times higher than the UK’s
£3,200 in the UK, but the sale would incur taxes of £66,600 in France – driving UK SUV sales to four times the level in France.
And the headline figure is "up to 20 times", which roughly matches the £66k.
The Grauniad making typos? Never!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Guardian#References_in_popular_culture
What's an SUV though because the industry has a lot of cars they call SUVs and quite a lot and don't look remotely like each other.
I have an SUV from 2015 and the Volvo XC90 dwarfs it despite it apparently not been an SUV, so how does that work?
Volvo XC90
I searched this and Volvo's page for it calls it a "Large mild hybrid SUV". Here's a Volvo XC90 compared to a BMW X1 from 2011-2015. It would seem that SUVs have been increasing in size ...
Yeah essentially at this point what I own easy effectively a large car and not an SUV. The term effectively being rendered irrelevant by car manufacturer. At this point it means any vehicle that is not a hatchback.
I doubt it'd raise that much (the article states £1.72bn), as there seems to be an assumption increasing the tax wouldn't lead to a reduction in SUVs, and that everyone would just absorb the cost.
However, I still say go ahead! Even if it only raises a quarter of that, that's still money coming in, and it means fewer SUVs on our roads. That's a win-win.