this post was submitted on 20 May 2026
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I pay over $250/year for that privilege in Washington state. The goal is to make up for the gasoline tax I don't pay - which is fair in principle, because gas tax is used to maintain the roads we all drive on. What's not fair is that it's a flat amount. I drive less than 6000 miles/year. The electric car flat fee is approximately the gas tax a Prius driver would pay to drive twice that far. So to drive an all-electric car I'm being taxed twice as much tax as if I drove a hybrid. Insane.
Roughly half of the money that gets spent on US roads comes from sales taxes, property taxes, income taxes, etc., and none of that bears any relation to how much driving you (we) do.
I'm really trying to figure out how that makes it OK to tax an EV for double per mile as compared to a prius. The only point I see you making is that roads are fucking expensive to maintain and they drain taxes from everywhere.
I wasn't trying to say "Therefore it's all OK," so much as "none of this makes any sense, none of this has ever been fair."
Even non-drivers wind up paying taxes for roads.
And this is on top of the fact you pay an electric tax when you charge.
EVs in Washington are already double taxed!
The alternative is for you to pay by mile. Let’s see what kind of big brother scheme they would come up with for that…
I hate to pull the "You Yanks still have it cheap" card, but I just did the math for my car, assuming 10,000 km (6k miles) annually and a generous 8 liters (29 mpg?) fuel consumption. At current gas prices (2€ per liter), that's slightly under 800 Euros per year that the state collects at the pump (gas tax, CO2 surcharge, VAT adding up to at least half the price of gas). In addition, 135 € per year flat tax to have the car registered.
That said, the idea that you have to pay a penalty tax for driving a EV while the brodozers don't is, well... idiotic.
The person you're responding to was only talking about the tax, I think. 12k miles @ 40 mpg is 300 gallons, or let's say $1300/year at today's prices. The gas tax is flat rate per gallon and works out to a little under $240 for that 300 gallons, for the federal gas tax, anyway. On top of that, in the US, depending on the state & local jurisdiction, you will have some combination of state gas tax, excise tax for registering in a specific municipality/county/other, a registration fee (not always every year), and a yearly inspection fee.
In Massachusetts where I live, for a typical personal passenger vehicle, the state gas tax is an additional 27.47 cents per gallon, there's a biennial $60 registration, and a $35 yearly inspection. In my town, specifically, I pay about $75/year excise tax. My vehicle isn't the most efficient, so I'm in the neighborhood of $2500 in fuel costs annualizing current prices - of that about $700 is state gas tax and $465 federal.
One thing not included in either your calculations or the other person's, is we also subsidized the oil industry. So even if you don't drive at all your still paying tax for money that ends up being for oil companies and roads.
The gas tax also only covers about half of road expenditures generally. The myth that the gas tax funds roads is a convenient lie to get people to believe they are acting independently when every commute they take in their lifted Ford F8500 Eagle edition is in fact reliant on state welfare