Editorial
Our first ten years…
It was 1995. A group of people, among which your editor, decided that the time had come to give voice to ecological cars – and the industry connected to this type of automobile – in order to offer people and institutions information and to initate a debate on gas used for driving. Indeed the targets – as energetic admen would say – were cars and gas, and the title of
the magazine was: At full Gas Speed News. So no doubt about the subject. One must not forget that these were hard times. When the first edition of the magazine was published (5th September 1995), the infamous “super road tax” that penalized gas vehicles was still in force. The sector was very jumbled up, the technical regulations were inadequate and the sector was lagging behind all the other international ones. The distribution network was insufficient, installations were slow and the associations belonging to the sector were making their first difficult steps ahead. So to sum it all up, the sector was going through a bad crisis.
A real novelty! As one could say, but the first edition of the magazine was auspicious: on 27th September 1995 the Council of Ministers decided to partially abolish the super road tax for the recently constructed cars. Now we don’t want to brag about our old merits but we do want to remind you about the very clear message we launched when we sent the magazine to all the members of parliament: Be careful because there are more than a million gas vehicles, each family has a car and each family gives at least 3 votes…So there is a cross-party made up of gas car drivers…
Since then quite a lot has happened. The super road tax has been abolished and this certainly wasn’t easy to achieve: our magazine was the promoter of a petition and more than 100,000 signatures were gathered. Then there was a harsh battle in order to be able to park cars in underground garages – a battle fought for 7 years! Then there were other problems concerning the safety of gas systems, the reskilling of garages...and much, much more. We gave out information and we were the first ones to promote the use of gas and new technologies for sustainable mobility. All this happened within the difficult context of a European automotive market which was strongly influenced by large automobile and oil Companies whose objective was (and still is) to sell, sell, sell…
Have problems now been solved? Not all of them unfortunately. The magazine has since then become an international magazine, with articles translated into English and with a new name since 2003. This has underlined its informational role on ecological mobility. Environmental and political themes have become more and more important and the consensus of our job has also risen – we have gone from 15,000 copies to 55,000.
However we are not yet fully satisfied. We are now facing a certain political class that seems unable to understand the problems connected to the sector and the strategic role of clean mobility. There are circulation bans on all cars except for gas vehicles, but clean fuel is taxed in Italy more than in any other European country, where there are no bans at all. There are incentives for people who buy or transform their car system to gas system. Money however it used up quite quickly and refinancing always has delays. Municipalities recommend the use of gas vehicles, but the municipality cars have traditional fuel (even during the ban periods). The price of clean fuel is not based on environmental value but on taxes. The sector is going through a crisis too and information and communication is fundamental more than ever. There are great commitments to face and the future is uncertain, but we are hopeless optimists and….we have another ten years till our next anniversary.
Ugo Nazzarro
