New car diesel sales are in freefall, older diesels are banned from some city centres and the electric car is making serious inroads into the marketplace. If you own a diesel car now, should you get sell it now or stick with it? It depends, is the short answer.
Diesel drivers know the benefits, primarily a far larger range than petrol (and certainly electric cars) because of much better fuel economy. If you drive a lot of motorway miles, diesels still make sense, and because of their better pulling power are best if you need to tow caravans or trailers. In the UK, the price difference between a litre of diesel and petrol remains small.
City centre charging and Euro 6
Extras charges may make you sell your diesel car. If you have to park on a city street in a residents’ parking bay, you may already know that it costs more for an annual diesel parking permit than petrol, hybrid or electric.
More importantly, if you live in a UK city which has a clean air zone (or is planning to introduce one), this may mean the diesel goes. You also may want to factor this in if you are moving home to a new city.
Because of demanding emissions legislation and in the wake of the emissions scandals, where manufacturers like Volkswagen cheated the results of tests, the emissions of the very newest diesel cars are as clean as petrol engines thanks to complicated pollution-control systems. However, if you have a diesel built before September 2015 then it will already be posing a problem if you must drive in and out of some UK city centres.
Before September 2015, the emissions regulation which diesel cars had to conform to was called Euro 5. It was then replaced by the much more demanding Euro 6 standard, which have been toughened several times in the last few years (Euro 6d came into effect in January 2021). You can find out to which category your car belongs by looking on its registration document.
You can also put your registration plate (or for that matter any other) into the government’s clean air zone checker. For now, if you have a Euro 6 diesel you can keep calm and carry on.
London’s Ultra Low Emission Zone (ULEZ) came into force in October 2021 and covers the largest area of any UK city. Any pre-Euro 6 diesel car, van or minibus must pay £12.50 a day to drive inside the zone.
Bath, Birmingham and Portsmouth now have clean air zones and Bradford, Greater Manchester, Sheffield and Newcastle all plan to introduce them in 2022. However, for these cities private cars are currently exempt. An up-to date English cities list can be found here.
On the other hand, a pilot scheme starting in a small part of Oxford city centre in 2022 will charge Euro 6 diesel drivers £4, and £8 from 2025. Bristol plans a small city centre zone pilot this summer and will charge non-Euro 6 diesels £8 a day.
Outside of England, Cardiff has decided not to have a clean air zone charge for now and low emission zones are planned for Aberdeen, Dundee, Edinburgh and Glasgow in 2022.
But is now a good time to sell?
For all the previous reasons, or because you feel that it’s the right thing to do for the environment, you may want to sell your diesel car now. Surprisingly, the values of used diesel cars are holding up as well as petrol (as of early 2022), caused by long delivery times for new cars.
According to Richard Walker, Auto Trader’s director of data and insights, the increase in used cars values is set to continue through 2022, including diesels.
He says: “We are seeing the biggest increases among 3–5-year-old used diesel vehicles (up by 32% year on year). Even though the price increase is lower for older diesel vehicles, with the prices of diesel cars aged 10 – 15 years up 19% and diesel cars older than 15 years reporting an increase of 18%, all age groups continue to see significant surges in price.”
Having saved money during the pandemic, a growing number of used car buyers are treating themselves to a prestige SUV from the likesof BMW, Mercedes, Audi or Jaguar Land Rover. They have little choice but to buy a diesel version because over the last few years they have dominated the mix of such manufacturers.
If you do decide to sell and you live in a clean air zone, we would advise against selling privately locally but trying one of the national buying services such as our partner Motorway, which offers cars to dealers across the country to bid for the best offer. There are still keen buyers for diesel cars who never drive into city centres.
What if I want to keep my diesel?
If your diesel car is on a personal contract purchase (PCP) deal, you can’t sell it (it still belongs to the manufacturer) but when the end of the agreement is reached you can choose whether to pay off the final (balloon) value or return it. If its final value is now lower than the market value you could pay it off then sell it, but the simplest option is to give it back. Then if you really want a new diesel, consider leasing one.
If you own your Euro 6 diesel and it’s, say, a year old, you aren’t currently subject to city centre charges and can park off-road, consider keeping it long-term. Especially if you just like it and just don’t want to sell. Even though there is currently a blip in the used car market with rising values, selling on any car within the first three years normally means you have lost a huge chunk of its value in depreciation. Keeping it for five years or more flattens this out completely, and diesels are built for racking up large mileages without complaint.
Also, because new diesel sales are falling, in a few years’ time the amount of available used diesels will in turn be far less. If some buyers continue to value them, this scarcity could prop up values. Of course, this is not certain.
Looking even further ahead, from 2030 sales of new cars and vans powered wholly by petrol and diesel will be banned in the UK. In the run-up we can expect to see a rush of financial incentives to trade in or scrap older petrol and diesel cars against new electric vehicles.
As they introduce clean air zones, councils have also launched incentives to scrap older petrol and diesel vehicles. From 2019 London offered £1,000 – £2,000 grants to scrap non-compliant cars and motorcycles. More than 8,000 vehicles were scrapped before the money ran out.
