Quote from Becky Rose :

Well I didnt particularly shop around, but yes we do pay an aweful lot for cars over here. Basically the motor manufacturers have been outright ripping us off for years, and to say it is a conspiracy is absolutely true - because the marques act like a cartel in the British market.

Sadly we cant mass produce products in this country, apart from battery farms for Turkey's, so we pay over the odds for most things.

No, you must be wrong, cars are cheap there, Vauxhall Monaro VXR 500 costs there less than low spec Audi A4 here and we can't even have Monaro Monaro would be however more fun than 4 Audis

My car for example costs here 10 times more than in UK and we can't get even LPG (or if I put such system in, I must pay many times car's worth of taxes every year) so running car is very expensive too.

Of course, AUS and US have stupidly cheap car prices and people in US do have free fuel really, well they pay 1/4 of what we pay here. Their food, clothes, houses, cars and fuel is lot cheaper than we and still they earn more money, but still are in deep loans, well they pay more from phone so I guess that is where all money goes?

Quote from JTbo :

Their food, clothes, houses, cars and fuel is lot cheaper than we and still they earn more money, but still are in deep loans, well they pay more from phone so I guess that is where all money goes?

As the old saying goes when refering to wealth creation "It's not how much you earn, but what you do with what you earn..."

I've seen plenty of people on very large incomes who are relatively poor

The Monaro starts at £14k in Oz with a RWD V6, simple car but I'm sure it's far more fun than any FWD saloon will ever be.

Unfortunately we pay silly amounts of tax on things because it's 'green' to do so. Having said that the needless V8s/heavy cars in the states and care free usage of fossil fuels isn't great either, there needs to be a balance that people need to want to find rather than being forced to do so. I don't care whether global warming is being caused by us (although for what it matters I believe it is) we need to wake up and realise we live in an unsustainable throw away society. It's hard justify motorsport, personally I think it's too tiny to make a difference but when you start trying to use it to greenwash then it just gets silly.

I guess it is hard to justify something frivolous like motor racing in an increasingly greening world. Just running around in circles, actually going nowhere and producing nothing but gases and fun ...
... but I wonder how many race cars are in use at any one time in the world, and how many tonnes of pollution they produce per driver. Tens or hundreds of thousands? How would that number (whatever it is) compare to the countless tonnes of pollution created by the millions of road cars (many of which would be much less well-maintained and probably more polluting than your average race car) carrying just one person to work each and every day? I'd like to see some numbers on that, if they exist.

I ride my mountainbike 11km to work every day (which is no slower than catching the train, oddly enough) and 90% of the cars I see (just cars, I'm not counting cabs, cop cars, vans, trucks or obvious work vehicles) have the driver and noone else inside. Many of them are 6-cylinder 4-door family sedans and not little 4-pot 3-door commuter cars (which would make more sense). How much crap is that one person spewing into the atmosphere? Do you think it could compare to one race driver's pollution over race day or a whole race weekend?