In Norway, I reckon when the oil runs out they'd choose to maintain their standard of life, but not their personal wealth. They'd have less stuff, but the scandinavian attitude to what matters in life means they're not going to flog themselves to the bone to let them have shiny toys.

I'm baffled by how many hours some people are willing to work (at a job they often don't greatly enjoy) to pay for their shiny new Mercedes.

I'm not sure of the exact mechanics, but they're attached with fittings that are hard to remove, and attempting to just pull the plate off without removing the two fixings makes it come off in pieces. They're still quite resistant to being kicked, it's not like they're fragile.

The petrol station would be allowed to override it if it was broken. If you were that bothered, you could make it a condition that they put in a service call before disabling it.

My other favourite with the congestion charge was people applying for a private-hire taxi license, which only cost £82 to apply and then £27pa. Then you were exempt from the £8 per day congestion charge. From memory there were Lamborghinis and Rolls Royces registered in this way.

If I had to guess, yes.

They try to control plate production, and fit them in a way that makes them hard to remove without shattering them. Doesn't sound like an easy war to win.

Having a written constitution is great, but it's a shame so many people fail to understand them.

Policing the enforcement of democratically enacted laws doesn't in any way clash with democracy, constitutional or otherwise.

/Normally/ this requires you drive with trade plates on though as far as I'm aware.

There's quite a line in stealing plates from cars to fit on matching makes and models. Non-trivial to spot unless you're happy to keep pulling over the victim, or reissue registrations.

I both like and dislike those options. Road tax allows you to tax differently efficient and inefficient cars. And by that I mean 99g of CO2/km gets free road tax, whereas your V8 Bentley would be paying £460pa. If you switched to pure fuel tax rather than that being a 0% vs 100% example, it'd end up being more like 20% vs 100%. Maybe that's okay. It'd directly discourage people from driving more miles, which would be no bad thing.

I'm not sure you should apply the same to insurance though, as then are you not subsidising poor drivers? I've always paid my tax/insurance/MOT and have a clean license and insurance. Under a national fund, would I end up paying the same as the 25 year old with 9 points on his license who has already been disqualified three times?

We already give foreigners a cushty ride on driving penalties, I don't imagine this will be any different.

Ah, but I can get a tax disc and then cancel my insurance. Or I can not pay so it's invalidated. Or I can cancel it but then reapply for insurance from another company and one company being faster to report it to the DVLA than the other means I'm insured but the DVLA think I'm not. Trust me, their records aren't 100% accurate. In the past I was under no obligation to inform the DVLA when the car was off the road (SORN) so they couldn't be sure whether it was valid me having the car uninsured. Fixing that loophole made quite a big difference in itself, as it means any car owner who hasn't got a SORN and doesn't have insurance *is* breaking the law. Unless you claim you've just sold it and you've only just posted the forms off...

You might think it's trivial, but the way it's setup at the minute, it really isn't. Equally you blame the driver here for being late renewing. If I've got insurance that runs out just before my tax disc, I can't get my new tax disc with the old insurance (because the DVLA reject it as invalid is it's nearly expired), but the new insurance details can't be entered on the DVLA site until they're valid. Is that my fault for being last minute?

This would work just fine if the database was correct, which it simply isn't. Delays in getting information updated would mean you having a fully licenses, taxes, MOTed, and insured car that you couldn't fill up with petrol. So there'd need to be a way of overriding it, which puts a whole lot of pressure on the vendor.

Nice in theory, but I don't see it working. That doesn't mean I don't see it happening.

Ah yes, that makes much more sense. Magnetics isn't a term I knew.

I had the exact same thought and googled magnetic jacks:

I'm assuming that's the case here, and the magnets are providing filtering (given the cable's got a predominantly plastic and copper end it's not going to do much to hold it in place).

I really like LED catseyes for the somewhat silly reason that I somehow find it preferable having a stream of lights in my mirrors than nothing at all. They also seem much more visible in fog.