Taxi Driver Online

On a similar track, numpty truck driver taking the roundabout too fast and completely knackering the traffic coming in and going out of the city.

_________________
IDFIMH

Mrs Sx to me - 'Are you ignoring me?'

Me to Mrs Sx - 'Why did you ask that?'

Mrs Sx to me - 'I asked you a question, and you didn't answer'

Me to Mrs Sx - 'Sorry dear, what was the question?'

Mrs Sx to me - 'I've forgotten what it was now'.

_________________
IDFIMH

Customers leaving rubbish in my new car.

Family leaving rubbish in my new car.

_________________
IDFIMH

the emergency services using blues and twos at 03.30 in the morning on a quiet main road with no vehicles about

_________________
lack of modern legislation is the iceberg sinking the titanic of the transport sector

Rear seat belt alarms.

I spend my life telling people the reason the alarms are going off isn't that bits are falling off the car; it's because they are not adhereing to a law that's been in place for 37 years.

_________________
IDFIMH

Mine is the diesel premium.

Diesel is averaging 197.2p a litre this morning, unleaded 173.2p. Twenty four pence between two fuels that come out of the same barrel, and the gap has been widening rather than closing these past couple of months.

Put it in year money. Thirty thousand miles at a genuine 45 mpg is about 3,030 litres, so every single penny on the pump price is thirty quid a year. That 24p gap is seven hundred pounds. Premium diesel at 215.6p is another 18.4p on top of ordinary, five hundred and fifty more again, and a fair bit of that goes in because the pump is nearest the door rather than because the engine asked for it.

I do the fuel side for a small fleet rather than drive a cab, so I will not pretend I do your hours. But thirty pounds a penny is the number I wish someone had told me years ago.

What I can’t work out is why fuel is so expensive.

Yes I get the nutter in the USA doesn’t help, but 30% of cars now don’t use petrol or diesel, so surely supply has got to exceed demand.

_________________
IDFIMH

Why fuel is expensive

1) most british (and american) refineries were designed and built in the 60's and 70's to produce mainly petrol

2) North sea oil nowadays is the thick sludge that's only good for producing RFO's so not much use in uk refineries

3) more modern refineries featuring hydrocrackers which produce DIESEL and Jetfuel were built mostly in Russia,Poland Saudi Arabia, Iran, Kuwait which funnily enough cannot now supply and the 4 uk refineries that are left with just one exception won't modernise with the imminent threat of the ban on diesel and petrol cars what would be the point ?

4) the government wants high prices to drive us all to buy electric cars

The green lobby won the argument in britain years ago and now we all have to pay the price

_________________
lack of modern legislation is the iceberg sinking the titanic of the transport sector

When diesel cars first took off, wasn't diesel a lot cheaper than petrol at the pumps?

So to that extent, diesel was win-win - cheaper to fill the car, and much better mpg.

But years later (and a good few years ago now) didn't the government change the fuel duty in relative terms to make diesel more expensive, thus to negate the mpg advantage - and they knew that because of the mpg advantage drivers would still be willing to pay for dearer diesel.

And, of course, while at one time the government promoted diesel as the green option, they changed their minds on that, and to that extent that also justified the higher diesel prices in terms of a deterrent to running diesel motors?

In fact that's all one reason I changed back to petrol after nearly two decades of diesel cars - over that time the price advantage of running a diesel had disappeared, or at least it was a lot less clear-cut.

(That's not the only reason I changed back to petrol, but certainly a factor.)

StuartW, I went and looked, because I half believed the same thing. The government's weekly fuel price series goes back to June 2003, and in every week of it the duty on diesel and unleaded is the same figure: 45.82p a litre on both in 2003, 57.95p on both in 2018, 52.95p on both now. VAT is the same on both too. So whatever happened in the nineties when diesel cars took off, for the last twenty odd years the tax hasn't been what makes diesel dearer.

Diesel was already the dearer fuel in the first week of the series, June 2003, at 76.8p against 74.6p. The only time in the whole series it dropped below unleaded was a handful of weeks between August 2015 and February 2016, when crude fell through the floor.

edders23 has the real reason, and the energy statistics back him up. In the first quarter of this year the UK produced 3,732 thousand tonnes of petrol and exported 2,078 of it, more than half. For road diesel it went the other way: 3,093 produced here and 2,527 imported. So getting on for half the diesel we burn comes in by ship, and the commentary with those figures puts some of that down to Grangemouth and Lindsey closing last year. You pay what an imported cargo costs, and that's the premium.

Sussex, that's also why the cars going electric don't bring it down much. We're a small buyer in a European market, and a cargo of diesel costs what it costs in Rotterdam whatever the car park at Tesco looks like.

Trade representatives who haven't got a f***ing clue.

Now, who is to blame the most: the idiots, or the ones who put the idiots in place?

_________________
IDFIMH

Baggage handlers at T5 Heathrow.

The snails of the airport world.

_________________
IDFIMH

Passengers who pull the seat belt out until there's none left, and then keep pulling on it anyway so it gets folded/jammed in the pillar and won't go back in.

Third time this week

considering that most people are not strangers to vehicles they would know how to work a seatbelt !

_________________
lack of modern legislation is the iceberg sinking the titanic of the transport sector

Personally I find it quite easy to NOT do this in any vehicle -



45 minutes of the devil's own work fixing it today.