IMHO - The entire UK car market has been going down the pan since the introduction of the new car tax regs, then accelerated with WLTP - and they seemingly keep wanting to blame it on the VAG emissions scandal.
So as a private car buyer, any sense of frugality will mean you want to stay away from the magic £40k VED hike, which strangely affects the 'cleaner' options of hybrids / zero emission cars more as they typically sit in that bracket, so it's natural to want to buy an older car which pre-dates the tax reg changes, or just lease?
As a company car owner, they are now being shafted by the new EU emissions testing program, and the fact that BIK rates are still reliant on 'back-porting' the new WLTP emissions outputs to the old CO2 based standards, miserably at that. That or the emissions scandal ends up absolutely jacking the BIK rate of cars up. Therefore, be it VAG with their emissions scandal, or WLTP, it looks like I am going to be shafted either way when it comes to replacing my car towards the end of the year. Not helped again by a 3% hike in company car tax across the board this year
Example:
My current MY17 A4 2.0 TFSI has a CO2 emissions of 119g/km - putting it into a 27% BIK rate from April 2019.
The 2019 A4 40 TFSI (same output / torque) having 137g/km - or 31% as a BIK rate - again from April 2019.
That difference in the emissions alone equates to an extra ~£550 pa at a 40% tax rate payer, or £45.82 pm for a bog standard A4 S-Line 40 TFSI Saloon. Might seem small, but frustrating that the driver ends up paying the price for the emissions farce / WLTP if you go purely like-for-like when replacing.
I get that it's to push people towards cleaner vehicles. But if Audi are introducing things like mild hybrid technology, how comes the emissions are so much worse when 'apparently' it was only Diesels affected by the scandal?
It's going to be a lot of sums and looking around come the time I start looking to replace. I'm probably either going to be footing a much higher bill or preferably look to other places like Japanese (where you get more for your £) like
@holly35 says.
The Audi refinement is quite like nothing else I've experienced to date, but my wallet will have to come first and could mean jumping to the likes of Lexus to get that balance of tax vs. functionality.