Diesel Hits £2 a Litre: Green Transition Complete

Britain has crossed a threshold nobody wanted to cross. The RAC reports that the average price of a litre of diesel at UK filling stations hit 200.01p on October 2, the first time in history the average has exceeded £2. At the end of February, when the US-Iran war began, it was 142.38p. A 55-litre tank of diesel now costs £110.01, almost £32 more than at the start of the war. Petrol has climbed too, averaging 174.71p a litre. RAC head of policy Simon Williams called it a pump price threshold that no one wanted to cross, heaping more misery onto motorists, and noted the cruel twist: diesel vehicles, once considered the most cost-effective option for long journeys, are now the ones burning holes in pockets. For an average 45mpg diesel car, the cost works out at about 20p per mile, so a driver covering 10,000 miles a year is now spending £2,020 on fuel.

The drivers are responding exactly as economics predicts. September was the best month ever for electric car sales in the UK: New AutoMotive counted 99,827 new battery electrics, up 37.5 percent on the year, taking 28.2 percent of the market, while diesel cars fell to just 4.6 percent of new registrations. "With fuel prices at £2 a litre, drivers are voting with their wallets," said New AutoMotive chief executive Ben Nelmes. The G7 held an emergency meeting and agreed to release 100 million barrels of oil to moderate prices. Ministers will surely frame all of this as the green transition working. And technically it is. The transition was simply achieved the easy way: not by making the alternative affordable, but by making the old option unbearable.

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