Porsche Claim Is A Bit Rich

Luxury car-maker Porsche has launched a high court bid to halt Ken Livingstone’s plans to impose a tax on high-emission cars entering central London.

Under the plans – which will be scrapped anyway, if the Conservatives win May’s mayoral election – owners of high-performance sports cars (such as Porsches) and big SUVs (such as Porsches) will face a daily charge of £25 from October.

Porsche Cars GB’s long-nosed managing director, Andy Goss, said that the case was “about protecting London and Londoners from a new tax that will not only fail to reduce carbon dioxide emissions in central London, but also increase congestion and damage air quality."

Mr Goss declined to say quite how charging the extremely rich for the privilege of continuing to crawl around the City in their fume-belching toys would make congestion and pollution worse than it already is. Experts fear they might decide that, since the charge is fixed at £25 regardless of vehicle size or damage to the environment, they may as well go for bust and trade their Porsches for something even bigger, perhaps with multiple jet or rocket engines.

"Porsche should be using its engineering expertise to create low polluting cars,” said an unrepentant Ken Livingstone. “But maybe their market research suggests that their customers are selfish, status-obsessed scumbags who laugh at the menial pedestrians choking on their pollution.”

Porsche, however, pointed out that they are very concerned about the environment, which is why they have not - so far, at least - tooled up for mass-production of their founder’s 1945 blueprints for a 100-ton Nazi super-tank.