Weight penalty: “This is nothing more than a new disguised tax”

Free stand

Smart, the government. By passing a CO2 penalty grid over three years last year, he almost nipped in the bud the traditional controversy that arises each fall, with the publication of the Finance Bill for the coming year. The scale, which becomes even tougher in 2022 and increases the bill up to 40,000 euros (50,000 euros in 2023!) Has literally gone unnoticed, especially since the rise in the price of fuel was heating up people’s minds much more at the same time. Ditto for the weight penalty, also voted in 2020, but applicable in just over a month, on January 1, 2022. Not a finger to stand up and question the relevance of this decision, to the point that the putting the spotlight on the news could be likened to a rearguard fight.

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And yet. This penalty, born out of the Citizen’s Convention for the Climate and actively supported by Barbara Pompili, Minister for Ecological Transition, is nothing more than a new disguised tax, taking up the recipe combining punitive ecology and the prospect of tax revenue from the CO2 penalty. It is also based on the same logic: in fact, the latter already varies according to the weight, since a heavier car naturally emits more CO2 … and pays more in penalty. Automotive manufacturers estimate that for each 100 kg, 10 g of additional CO2 are emitted per kilometer. The existing penalty therefore already addressed this problem.

While it is fashionable to denounce the plumpness of today’s cars, it does not seem superfluous to recall that these “extra pounds” are, among other things, the consequence of better design: the strengthening of the cabin of the passenger compartment better protects the passengers, the deformable zones better absorb shocks in the event of an accident. But also, the addition of equipment that successive governments and parliamentarians have sometimes ended up imposing themselves, while they were already present on almost all of the automobile production (airbags, ABS anti-lock brakes, ESP antiskid …), For obvious reasons of improving safety.

Obviously, this excess weight caused by modernity influences energy consumption, and therefore greenhouse gas emissions and pollutants. But who today, in our European countries, would agree to lower the level of car safety in favor of CO2? Anybody.

Weight hunt

In any case, forced, on pain of heavy fines at European level, to optimize the performance of their engines and meet emission standards, manufacturers are working hard to lighten their vehicles. But the materials that must be required to achieve significant weight reduction (aluminum, carbon) remain more expensive than steel. However, the industrial time to make financially accessible a technology which ultimately benefits everyone has nothing to do with political time. For example, between the first ABS arrived on the Mercedes S-Class in 1978 and the obligation for all vehicles to be fitted with it (2003), 25 years have passed.

What is regrettable is that the French state is reducing this pressure from Europe to buyers of new cars, as the CO2 penalty is already doing. Moreover, as for the latter, at the League for the Defense of Drivers we have no doubts for a single moment that if the weight penalty initially only concerns vehicles weighing more than 1,800 kg, this threshold will not fail. ‘be scaled down at the first opportunity.

The threshold of the weight penalty will not fail to be revised downwards at the first opportunity

While no study on the impact of this tax on weight, whether environmental, technical or economic, has been carried out, it is therefore, once again, the portfolio of drivers who is requested *. Against the backdrop of the economic and health crisis, the weakened French automobile industry, the weakened sales sector, this new disguised tax serves only one cause: that of the government, which buys good behavior from environmentalists.

* Only exempt buyers: families with more than three children, who benefit from a reduction of 200 kg per child. Another allowance, of 400 kg this time, will also be applied for companies and legal entities purchasing a vehicle with at least eight seats.