GPL banned for oldies stupid?
Yes it is stupid but for the reason we need to go back a few decades.
Politicians in that time decided that we had to save our heritage carpark for next generations to come.
They decided that all vehicles older then 25 years became free of roadtax.
That cleared the road for collecting cars even if you have a budget.
Lots of people collect and a biz was born trading and repairing.
Because cars were getting better a lot of cars were used for daily use.
A nasty side effect of this was that old diesels were imported and mostly old Mercedes from Germany and they don't realy help the enviroment.
Also a lot of old cars got a GPL transplant.
Normaly tax is sky-high for this cars but older the 25 years it was free.
Therefore the politicians desided a few years ago that the taxfree age of oldtimers had to go to 30 years.
They implanted this law slowly in a period of 5 years.
That worked pretty good and import of old diesels slowed down.
Our politicians are not reliable.
The recession kicked in and they had to find extra taxes.
The Oldtimer again was target.
New law for oldtimers, the cars need to be 40 years.
Cars on diesel and GPL want have any advantage anymore and we all had to pay full tax again.
For diesel and GPL that is sky-high.
Our taxes are measured by weight of the car and kind of fuel.
For example.....
a heavy Landrover Diesel woudl have a roadtax of 3000 Euro a year.
Also heavy american muscle cars on GPL would go up to 4500 Euro a year.
You can understand that a lot of people were not happy espacialy when you have more cars.
The laws were implanted on very short notice.
Carclubs like ANWB and BOVAG couldn't do much.
Only thing they achieved was that cars 25-40 years on normal fuel pay around 100 Euro extra tax and have to get of the road from 1 december till 1 march.
If you have more cars from 25 - 40 years old you still need to pay a serious amount and the cars have to get of the street for 3 months.
Parking on the street is not allowed in that case.
Of course we are pissed and we planned a spontanious action to show our grieves.
We mobilised on the internet some people to hit the road to our political capitol Den Haag and block the whole city,
Something like this.
On 5 parkingplaces in Holland we gathered for what had to be a final protest.
The police came looking what was going on and warned Den Haag to get ready for a happening.
To let eryone know of the action we blocked the highway (yes it's me in the front) and we drove ultra slow.
News spread fast so the police was prepared for us and they blocked the city so we could not drive true.
We were directed to a field (maliveld) and ther we parked the cars.
From there we organised a meeting with one of the politicians to give a petition.
From there we got back and the whole action ended as one of the best oldtimer festivals ever with a very nice collection of cars.
Here some examples.
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