EV owners and Blue Badge holders urged to dodge new road tax rules

EV owners facing the end of the road for the road tax/vehicle excise duty (VED) exemption for electric cars, have a few weeks left to re-tax their vehicles at no charge for the year ahead.

You don’t need your current road tax to expire before taxing your car for another year, because a foible of the system means owners can opt to reset their annual renewal date to this month, even if they’ve still got weeks or months of their existing car tax left to run.

Doing so will mean skipping the £195 standard charge for up to a full year, because anyone taxing an EV that was first registered after 31 March 2017 will be liable to pay VED at the standard rate from April. 

The new VED rules also mean electric cars will be subject to the expensive car supplement from April. This will mean anyone registering an EV that costs more than £40k new after that date will pay a whopping £620 annually from years two to five – after which the tax reverts to the standard £195 charge.

Meanwhile Blue Badge holders who have registered an EV in the last eight years are being urged to check their exemption entitlement before forking out on the road tax being newly applied to electric vehicles.

According to Matt Fieldhouse of mobility firm Mobility in Motion, “Millions of disabled drivers who are reliant on public charging points for their EVs or hybrid vehicles could wrongly fork out £195 in road tax this April.”
That’s because many Blue Badge holders are exempt from paying VED, including those getting higher or enhanced-rate mobility components of Disability Allowances or Personal Independence Payments, or those entitled to the War Pensioners’ Mobility Supplement or Armed Forces Independence Payment.  

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