THE KING'S HIGHWAY A MOTOTING CAUSERIE

Ladies' Mirror, Volume 3, Issue 5, 1 November 1924, Page iii (Supplement)

THE KING'S HIGHWAY A MOTOTING CAUSERIE

r P HE outstanding fact in matters motoring at the time of writing is the favourable reception given by the House of Representatives to the Motor Vehicles Bill. Everybody had fault to find with different provisions of the measure, but nearly everybody was prepared to waive his objections in order to get the Bill through. When one considers what has occurred in the past sixteen years in the development of motor traffic it is almost incredible that the regulation of that traffic in this country should still he under an Act of 1908. The chief objections to the new measure, as expected, were on the basis of taxation. The flat rate was condemned as unfair in that it bore no relation to usage and damage inflicted on the roads. This is undoubtedly the case, but as the tax per private car amounts to no more than the modest sum of £2 per annum, the matter is not a very serious one so long as the flat rate remains at that level. The tyre tax, as we know, is wasteful, because it puts so much on to the cost of tyres in proportion to what the Government gets out of it. We have heard a lot about a petrol tax being free from this defect, but if everybody using petrol in a milking machine or motor launch is to get exemption, the door will stand most invitingly open for quite a lot of people to run their cars on exempted benzine.

The truth of the matter is that the ideal tax is a thing that will not easily be found —if indeed an ideal tax is not in any case a contradiction in terms so far as the taxpayer is concerned. Britain, for instance, pinned her faith to a tax on the basis of horse-power. That tax now stands at

£1 per horse-power per annum, equal to from £2O to £25 per annum on the average American car. This tax naturally set British designers to work to get the utmost out of a small horse-power, and so gave us the small bore, high-speed British engine. Americans not having any horsepower tax to dodge, built their engines of any power that suited them. The British car was thus forced by a particular system of taxation to develop along certain lines, and there can be no doubt, in building always with an eye on the horse-power tax, a certain handicap was imposed on the British motor export trade to countries where no such tax was in existence. In New Zealand, if we wished to impose a motor tax to stimulate trade in British cars, a horse-power is what we should go in for. However, we all seem to enjoy plenty of pep under the bonnet far too much to tax it away for patriotic or other reasons —all of which is not to say that the modern British engine, although of low nominal horsepower, has not plenty of ginger, for what some new British ears will do on a cupful of petrol is positively astounding. o o o On these sunny days a motor on the road is worth twenty-three under repair in the workshop. (Continued on page vii. of Motor Supplement)