A Tunbridge Wells diarist reads about the flying Tesla Roadster heading for production in 2028 and notes that the Treasury’s electric vehicle mileage charge arrives the same year
Wednesday, 21 October 2026. Royal Tunbridge Wells, Kent. The window seat of a tea room on the Pantiles, a toasted teacake, a view of the Chalybeate Spring where people have been drinking iron-flavoured water since 1606 for reasons nobody can explain, 11.00am.
A Car That Escaped Gravity
The London Prat has a lovely report on how Elon Musk unveiled the flying Tesla Roadster nine years after it was first promised. The car lifts itself over other Teslas on compressed air thrusters, drives upside down and reaches sixty in about a second. Customers have paid deposits for a car without a price. Production is targeted for 2028. The vehicle, the piece says, has escaped gravity but not the production schedule.
My first reaction was the same as everybody’s: delight, followed by mild suspicion. My second reaction, as a Kent motorist, was to check my calendar. Because 2028 is also the year, according to the Treasury’s plans set out in the last Budget, that electric car drivers in Britain are due to start paying a charge for every mile they drive. The flying car and the mileage tax are arriving together. I would like to congratulate somebody on the timing. I am just not sure who.
How Do You Tax A Car That Flies
The charge, as announced, is meant to replace the fuel duty that electric car owners do not pay. It is a perfectly logical idea, in the sense that most taxes are perfectly logical to the people who design them. But it raises a problem the Treasury has not addressed. If a Tesla flies over a row of other Teslas, has it travelled a mile on the road? Does a mile of air count? Is there a vertical charge? I fear the Treasury has a team working on it already. I fear the answer will be yes, and that there will be a form.
Labour’s relationship with the motorist has always been one of exasperated affection, like a vicar with a parishioner who keeps parking on the verge. They need our taxes. They dislike our cars. They love the idea of electric vehicles in principle, and are now discovering that every electric vehicle sold is a hole in the fuel duty receipts. So they are taxing the virtue they spent years subsidizing. It is the most Labour thing imaginable. First, they pay you to do it. Then they charge you for having done it.
The Sadiq Khan School Of Motoring
We in Kent have watched London’s war on the motorist with the horror of villagers watching a storm across the valley. The ultra low emission zone, expanded to the edge of Greater London under Sadiq Khan, means that people from the Kent border with older cars pay a daily charge to enter parts of the capital that used to be suburbs. My sister in Orpington, technically inside the zone, sold her perfectly good car rather than pay it, and now takes three buses to visit me. She arrives in a worse mood every time. I blame the Mayor. She blames the buses. We are both right.
A flying Roadster would at least solve her problem. It could go straight over the cameras. I suspect the Mayor would respond by extending the zone upwards. There would be cameras on church spires. There would be a skyward congestion charge. He would call it a clean air corridor, and it would cost twelve pounds fifty a day.
The Green Dream Car
The Green Party, of course, would not want a flying car at all. They want everyone on bicycles, preferably secondhand ones, ideally pedalled to a plant-based cafe. I have nothing against bicycles. I rode one to the bank every day in 1974. But it is a long way from Tunbridge Wells to anywhere, and the hills are not getting smaller. When the Greens explain how a seventy-eight-year-old woman in Rusthall is meant to cycle to her hospital appointment in Pembury, I will listen. Until then, I will keep my diesel, my teacake and my scepticism.
The Chalybeate Spring
Outside the window, a dipper, which is what they call the attendant, is offering a cup of the spring water to a party of tourists. Tunbridge Wells was built on the idea that this rusty water was good for you. For four centuries, people paid to drink it. It probably did nothing at all. But it made the town rich, and it gave the gentry somewhere to be seen. I sometimes think the Roadster is the Chalybeate Spring of our age. It may or may not do what it promises. But people will queue for it, pay for it and be seen with it, and the town that sells it will do very nicely.
The Teacake Verdict
I have finished the teacake. The tea room owner has asked whether I want another pot. I said yes, and asked her whether she would buy a flying car. She said only if it could carry the shopping and fit in a space on Calverley Road. I said it would probably be taxed per mile. She said everything else is. That, I think, is the Tunbridge Wells verdict on Labour’s motoring policy, delivered over a pot of Darjeeling: we do not mind paying, but we would like to be able to park.
