It seems British car-buyers are turning away from new vehicles in their droves. According to Joe Wright in the Telegraph we’re looking to a future with more and more people driving older and older cars, matching the nation’s ageing population:
Trusty motors from the 2000s and early 2010s such as the Peugeot 107, Ford Focus, Honda Jazz and Vauxhall Corsa are still a very common sight, with owners refusing to put them out to pasture.
In fact,16 million of the 34 million motors on Britain’s roads are more than a decade old. Experts believe this will continue to increase in the years to come thanks to Labour’s unrelenting war on motorists.
“People are definitely spending money to keep their cars on the road as opposed to upgrading,” explains Umesh Samani, Chairman of the Independent Motor Dealers Association. “The majority just want a car which gets them from A to B, and it’ll stay that way.”
The reluctance to buy means the average car is now 9.4 years of age. That’s a 42% rise from the average 6.6 years in 2003, according to insurer Green Flag.
It seems it’s a long-term strategy on the part of some drivers:
“People are already planning these things in their head. They know that down the road, there won’t be a choice of petrol, so they’re thinking ‘well, this could be my last one so I’ll keep it longer’.”
So much so, the number of shiny new cars sold to families and individuals has plummeted by almost 450,000 in the past eight years, according to figures from the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT) trade body.
Look back less than a decade and the scale of the collapse in new car sales is remarkable:
A total of 701,964 cars have been sold to private buyers so far this year, compared to 772,589 in 2023. It’s a huge slump from the record 1,138,610 sold in 2016.
It’s not hard to see how the Government is pulling out all the stops to discourage buying cars – even their beloved ‘planet-saving’ EVs – as part of what increasingly seems like a wider policy to crash the economy:
Rachel Reeves announced in her maiden Budget that Vehicle Excise Duty (VED) rates will be increasing from April. She also announced that electric vehicles (EVs) will no longer be immune from the levy, while bills for petrol, diesel and hybrid cars will rise by at least £100 and as much as £2,745.
Meanwhile, car manufacturers are doing their bit to sell fewer cars too:
The appetite for hatchbacks rather than SUVs is evident in the used car market, with the Ford Fiesta being by far and away the most-bought second-hand car, with 308,000 sold in 2023.
Samani adds: “People want little cars like that as a runabout, but they’re not making little sports cars any more. There aren’t many of what I call desirable cars on the market, and people aren’t particularly jumping up and down to buy EVs.”
Conversely, recent used cars are so much more reliable they are realistic prospects for far longer than in yesteryear:
Nowadays, well-made cars from the 2000s are lasting longer. They remain mechanically and electronically simpler than newer cars, and, in most cases, are relatively economical to keep on the road.
Some old bangers, likely made by a reliable Japanese or Korean brand, can run like a Swiss watch even when they are decades old.
Worth reading in full.
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Why should life have meaning?
‘Consider the lily….’
The one who coined that phrase has the answer.
Consider the birds, do they have jobs?
They do all right for themselves.
Good luck to them, they’re very nice
All right then consider the lilies
Oh! He’s having a go at the flowers.
Taken from Life of Brian.
‘And there shall be a great confusion as to where things really are….’
‘And the young shall not know where lieth those things that their fathers put there only just the night before at about eight o’clock…’
Scientism and science explain very little.
Metaphysics, the immaterial, the spiritual, the human, objective truth, meaning…science has nothing to offer. Even on basic scientific matters it is usually wrong or corrupt.
The modern world is suffused with the material and the mechanical, but it has no wisdom, no purpose, no truth.
Christ, God, divinity, reality, the why, the when, the how of life and the cosmos, are all lost in the materialist fantasies of human error and blind egotism.
According to Wikipedia: “Science is a systematic discipline that builds and organises knowledge in the form of testable hypotheses and predictions about the universe.”
Seems like a reasonable definition.
I don’t see how science could possibly “tell us the meaning of life”. That’s not what science is concerned with. “The meaning of life” is surely something that is in the eye of the beholder and as such how I don’t see what or who could possibly “tell us” what it is.
Yes, that is the classical definition of science, when it had integrity, but science has been updated for political purposes, with horrors such as “conservation scientist”, “scientists are worried/concerned about …” and “Follow The Science”.
You come with nothing (of material value).
You go with nothing of material value so the meaning (purpose) of life must be beyond the material.
There is a Mount Everest volume of (many verifiable) accounts of Near Death Experiences that point unerringly to the reason we are here.
Once you understand this you can feel only pity and not hatred for those engaged in selfish and evil actions (here’s looking at you W.E.F and your ilk)
Given that, based on an atheist or scientific world view, we come from nothing, exist for a period of time as the result of millions of complex chemical reactions, then return to nothing it’s easy to see why some people think this world view has no meaning.
The most important reply to these people is that the world is the way it is whether you like it or not and hoping that there’s a god to give life meaning doesn’t make that god any more likely to exist.
In the absence of a god, if this is the case, it’s up to us to give our lives meaning, maybe by helping other people who, just like us can suffer or experience happiness, simply trying to do no harm, or just enjoying your brief period of existence.
Or as a friend once put it ‘We’re all just blimps (sic) on the oscilloscope of life’.
Many thanks for trying to cheer me up, David.
You call it should last
Every minute of the future
Is a memory of the past
‘Cause we all gave the power
We all gave the best
And everyone gave everything
And every song everybody siiiing
Live is life! ( na-naah-na-na-na )”
It can’t.
Scientia = knowledge, not wisdom, not understanding, not discernment.
That knowledge is useful, but continually evolves over time, constantly changes.
Ergo, science is not truth.
The humanist religion treats it has all the ‘nots’ above.
Life means nothing without a relationship with its creator.
Find Jesus this Christmas.
He is The Truth.
I usually find David Bell’s articles interesting and well written. Either I am experiencing extreme brain fog or this is not up to his usual standard of clarity. Sorry!
Ha ! Something meaningful at Christmas. Whatever next !
It seems to me that life is meaningful. It is only when we delegate sentient understanding to thought and knowledge that we acquire the continuity of time, and come to see life as integrated within that context. Then we have the conceptual problem of death, and invent a life hereafter to make ourselves feel better. The beginning of time is always now and death is the understanding of death and not the death of understanding
Science is only a system of representational meaning, and can only explore the representational universe. The system pursues efficiency while thinking about “meaning”
First define ‘Life’.
Then define ‘Meaning’.
Then we shall see if the ‘Meaning of Life’ is a reasonable item to investigate scientifically, or even spiritually.
This article reminds me of a study by Pfizer (https://www.pfizer.com/news/articles/how_genetically_related_are_we_to_bananas) that we are genetically related to bananas.
What an excellent article. It really summed up the two alternatives neatly. We’re either a collection of atoms that comes together in a certain way for a period of time before dissipating, or our life and everything has more meaning and purpose than we can even imagine. (And love is more than a chemical reaction). I feel David’s point that there’s nothing in between is very powerfully put. I’d even compare it to CS Lewis. David, rather cleverly, didn’t say which side he came down on but I hope the hint in the last paragraph indicates that he is celebrating the coming of Christ this Christmas.
Happy Christmas to Will and all my Daily Sceptic friends.