4x4s to chauffeur athletes at London's green Olympics? Here's an idea...

It’s been suggested that at the Olympics, the athletes will be chauffeured around in heavy-duty 4x4s made by a well-known company based in the UK.

These are big mommas. Sweet when you’re in one, but for everyone else, the term that seems to have stuck in the media is “gas-guzzling Chelsea tractor”.

And given that the 2012 Games are set to be the greenest we’ve ever seen, we’re off to a bit of a bad start here.

It’s also been rumoured that the London authorities would charge a full-whack congestion tax on these cars at the time of the games.

So here’s a bit of random speculation and an idea for the London Olympic committee and for a company that makes these cars.

Say there are 300 4x4s running around (we heard it was a lot more, but we don’t have the info to back it up), and every day, each car is taxed £25. That’s £7,500 a day made in taxes.

Times that figure by 18 days (roughly the number of days in a typical Olympic event) and that is £127,500.

That’s a lot of tax. But also a lot of CO2 being pumped out by these machines, which nobody wants to see.

But what if they used this carbon capture technology we’ve been banging on about? Perhaps, and this is just a perhaps guys, if the claims are true, they could cut their emissions by 80 per cent or more. That would bring the tax band right down on these monster machines.

Then you get the argument – well if you used smaller cars, you could get the carbon emissions down even further. And you’re probably right. But this was just a random idea for the two organisations…

Carbon capture seems to highlight one thing, however – it doesn’t fit into the tax man’s model at the moment. So the big question is that for this to be accepted, will the tax man be flexible enough to change the way he taxes things?

If he’s smart, he’ll find a new way of taxing people – accepting something like this would win a lot of votes. This is where tax folk tend to be quite innovative themselves – although, the poll tax wasn’t exactly a goer really, was it?

But as we said before, we don’t know whether the carbon-capture claims can be backed up. All we know is that a lot of BIG BIG companies are offering big big money to the guys behind it.