The Pretender - 11/10/2024 13:11

Cars here have to pay Vehicle Excise Duty and to be honest, it's not that expensive https://www.theaa.com/driving-advice/driving-costs/car-tax I think mine is about £160 a year, no big deal. If you have a big, thirsty car, it's a few hundred, maybe 500 quid, but on an 80 grand car, not so bad. There's also a "luxury car tax" on cars over 40 grand, which is another 900 quid, and the threshold is too low really.

People can have a company car through work to use privately, these used to be really common place, then the rules got changed and it was costing people a lot of money in tax, so people started buying their own cars and claiming business miles back.

Also, there's a lot on vans on the road, and I mean a lot. Tradesmen have them. They're no good as private vehicles with usually only 2 or 3 seats, they're driven hard and die young. If you have a van for work, you can take it home and it might cost you 2 or 3 hundred quid a year in extra tax, which is good value.

Enter the crew cab pickup.

Now these are taxed as commercial vehicles, not private cars, so were one to use one as a car, you'd pay a maybe £290 VED to tax the vehicle, and that's it. But as they are commercial vehicles, they can be put through your business as a cost and claim tax relief on the cost. Also, we have to pay Value Added Tax at 20% on some goods and services, this would include new cars and vans and the fuel and maintainance. Businesses that are VAT registered can claim the VAT back on business expenses like vehicles. So you buy you van for £45,000, there's 20% VAT on the top taking the cost to £54,000, but you claim the VAT back. With me?

However, private individuals can't claim VAT back. 

In the last few years manufactures have been offering crew cab pickups with a higher psec, similar to that of a car, they obviously still have pickup underpinnings, so don't driver like cars, as you all know, but people have been over looking this.

So what wpople have been doing is, buying/leasing a pickup with the RRP including VAT of the thick end of £60,000, putting the cost/lease through their business, claiming the VAT back on the purchase price, then claiming the VAT back on the fuel and maintainace and claiming the tax relief on the whole lot as a business expense. However, they've been using it as their private car, rather than the commercial vehicle it has been taxed as.

HMRC (our IRS) has been getting wise to this and said they were going to put a stop to it in the early part of the year, but there was a lot of crying and gnashing of teeth from the owners and it was forgotten about. Anyway, there was an election this summer, and the new government did their budget a couple of weeks ago  and are now going to tax crew cab pickups as cars, so because they are expensive and thirsty, this is going to cost people a fortune. It is rather amusing that people have been taking this piss ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taking_the_piss so you understand the term we use) with these vehicles and the tax loop hole and are crying when the loop hole gets shut.

What is slightly more interesting is how Ford Europe will react. You see, Ford had the top selling car in Europe or there abouts for the last 40 odd years and in their infinate wisdom decided to stop selling it in favour of high margin cross overs, SUVs and pickups, the two former they aren't really selling very many of, the latter has just had the market taken away from them. It was said that Ford made more profit in the optional extras on a Ranger than they did on a whole Fiesta. Not any more and they really are in trouble now. 

It's going to be interesting to see what happens and where the pickup target audience goes next. They really do attract a certain type, male, tattoos, facial hair and a more robust attitude to the Road Traffic Act. I can't see many people being attracted crew ca pickups now, when they are well specced BMW 3 Series money and you could get into a 5 Series too just about with no tax advantage.