Your Company ride

Roughly speaking, the benefit is seen as a percentage of the car's list price, based on emissions. I've just worked out a rough estimation of it on comcar.co.uk, based on my brother's company Alfa 147 2.0TS Selespeed Lusso.

For the 2005/6 financial year, the benefit in kind for the car itself is £5319, so it would cost a 40% taxpayer £2128 for the year.

Fuel cards are taxed separately, and these days, from what I can work out, how they do it is simply add £14400 to the list price of the car to work out the value of the benefit-in-kind of the company-expensed fuel card, so the actual value of the benefit varies with the emissions, which makes sense, as generally fuel consumption does too, so if the emissions are higher then a car will generally consume more fuel.

So for my bro's car, the fuel benefit will cost £1670 to a 40% taxpayer.

So overall, for a fully expensed brand new car, with all private fuel paid for, it'd cost, at most, £3798, or £316.50/month, or £174/month at basic rate.

It all depends how much you use the car - if I really didn't want a company car for private use at all, I'd kick and scream until they gave me access to a pool car for work use, or get an old diesel like Bob's done, and make a few quid on it.

The whole company car scheme does mean a lot less hassle for someone who'd quite like a new car - no borrowing money, or putting savings into a depreciating asset, no hassle with sorting out/paying for insurance, arranging to get it serviced, etc etc, and no risk of being lumped with still paying the finance payments if you get made redundant or whatever. You can see why people do go for it - I personally wouldn't, unless it was something particularly special, though. Handy for young people though, where insurance would be otherwise through the roof - they can get a decent modern car (or in my brother's case a Seleshite Alfa) that someone else is paying the insurance for, and build up a NCB (ok, not really, but a fair few insurers do accept a claim-free history on a company policy as NCB) so that if they wanted to own a car a few years down the track, it wouldn't be too pricey.

ed lots about company car tax stuff

all i know is that i pay approx £3 per week for my van, which is classed as different again to car tax

BUT

if you run a van and you use it for private as well as business use, the tax rate goes up to £3000 a year rather than £500 a year

i don't pay any tax on fuel even though it's on the company fuel card BUT i do have to adivse my logistics manager if i want to use the van other than for work (normally a sunday) because the auditers can come along at any time and ask to see the movements of a particual vehicle and then the company could get done for not paying neough tax or something so everytime the van is used after hours (whihc to be honest is saturday afternoons and all day sunday) as long as there is a record we can always say we were using it for official company business and everyone is happy

Aye, there are lots of ways around things. My brother used to have the fuel benefit, which he didn't use to a big enough degree to make it worthwhile, so he doesn't get it any more. Instead, he gets reimbursed at a rate of

16p/mile (what it costs in fuel, based on the first 30k or so - economy's improving now actually, as it's properly run in now at just under 50k) by means of a bonus in his pay packet. Basically he has to pay for private fuel, but he gets 60% off the price at the pumps, which works out much better than paying for a fuel card that he doesn't use that much.