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At the same time as the majority of the UK’s population was getting very upset indeed about two Radio 2 presenters wasting licence payer’s money, the European Commission announced its support for an EU wide scheme that could have results even less funny for the motoring enthusiasts amongst us than lewd phone calls to an answer machine… The proposed scheme would see motorists receive incentives to scrap ‘older’ cars and buy newer more fuel efficient models, plus a £32-billion package of low interest loans to help the motor industry develop new greener technologies. Now, whatever your views on the environmental challenges faced by the world, I think anyone would be hard pushed to argue that the development of ‘cleaner’ new cars, and cleaner ways of manufacturing those cars, can be a bad thing in the long term, so the proposal for the low interest loans is understandable, if not that easy to stomach in the current financial climate… However, I’ve a problem with the ‘scrapping’ side of such a scheme from two key perspectives. For starters, the architects of any such scheme would need to think very carefully about how they proposed to treat manufacturers of large, luxury, prestige cars such as Jaguar that, along with Land Rover, employs around 16,000 people. Jaguar Land Rover is already investing significant sums in developing ‘green’ technology, but the simple fact is that a luxury car such as an XJ is never going to be as environmentally friendly as something like a Citroën C1. To introduce a scheme that effectively incentivises customers to buy small cars will obviously put manufacturers that don’t produce such cars at a disadvantage, and that seems rather unfair – not to mention the potential of putting jobs at risk. Unsurprisingly, though, some manufacturers of smaller cars are supportive of the proposals. Secondly, from a pure motoring enthusiast’s point of view, any scheme that encourages the scrapping of old cars seems to be overkill.