This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
I don't mind a road tax. I prefer it over tolls. We already pay gas taxes for infrastructure. My issue is that it is a set price. I honestly think it should be based on the price and weight of your vehicle, and your annual mileage. A subcompact for your daily 20 minute commute is less damaging to the road than a truck traveling 70k miles per year is.
My other problem, no guarantees that it will be used for infrastructure.
Arkansas already charges an extra $200 annual registration fee for electric vehicles.
That's usually the case, as electric vehicles don't pay taxes on gas which is used for roads. Basically a system to make people who drive pay for the roads (and people who drive more will pay more as well).
Probably an unpopular opinion but this is to offset a federal fuel tax they aren’t getting since it’s an EV. It could be calculated better based on miles but that opens up a privacy issue.
My solution is due away with all fuel taxes and tax tires. They have a know wear rate based on miles, and don’t have any privacy issues like location tracking.
I heard that some countries charge a vehicle tax based on the weight of the vehicle. Some based on the number of cylinders.
One of the problems with removing the fuel tax is that affluent people will be able to avoid the additional registration tax by registering their vehicle in another state, such as where their summer home is. Having a gas tax allows taxes to go where the fuel is purchased and indirectly where the vehicle is using the roads. This doesn't work for electric vehicles.
I'm surprised no politician suggested toll booths all over.
Seeing as one truck does the damage of 10,000 cars on the roads, personal vehicles should not be paying the lion's share of road money.
So it shouldn't matter the type of tire.
Generally the wear on tires is proportional to the wear on roads, since both are effectively grinding against each other with grit as the grinding medium in between. It would be harder to find a more accurate way to measure an individual vehicle’s contribution to road wear, given that weight is such a large factor.
If you used mass surveillance to record exactly how many miles everyone drove and record exactly which vehicle model they were driving for each mile (to know the vehicle weight), you’d still miss out on the cargo factor. For transport trucks that’s the biggest factor, since an empty trailer weighs far less than a full one (and different types of goods have radically different densities).
Of course we already know how much transport trucks weigh and how many miles they drive, since transport trucks are required to go through weigh stations and drivers have to keep detailed logs of how many miles they drive (and hours they drive consecutively). The issue then comes down to consumers and other business vehicles (pickup trucks etc).
None of this is accurate:
Generally the wear on tires is proportional to the wear on roads, since both are effectively grinding against each other with grit as the grinding medium in between. It would be harder to find a more accurate way to measure an individual vehicle’s contribution to road wear, given that weight is such a large factor.
Surface wear on roads from tire contact is not a concern, the damage is done due to a combination of compression cycles (the 4th power law) and weather. The 4th power law being that road wear is equal to the 4th power of the axel load.
Your tire wear rate is based on so many unique factors, with vehicle weight being a relatively minor one. Force of accel/decell/turning, suspension tuning, tread, rubber compound, road material, etc.
Your tire rubber is not grinding away the road surface. It's wild that I even have to say that.
Those tires are much larger so you could just tax them more. Plus a pneumatic tire can only hold so much weight which is why they are 18 of them on a huge truck. Not to mention more load causes more wear on the tire so they go through them quicker. I mean it’s not perfect, lots of things affect tire wear like road surface, road smoothness, alignment, etc. Maybe you keep the diesel fuel taxes and just tax tires on passenger cars. Maybe give a tax break to small diesel cars to offset the double tax. Just brainstorming…
I think it's a good idea. It's more Progressive than what we have right now. The feds will never do it, some states could be forced to however. That is where the majority of these gas taxes come in at anyway.
Interesting points to me are the fact that this 130 fee is:
As pissed as I get at fees, electric cars don't typically pay a gas tax, the taxes we levy on fuel pay for road maintenance so that fee should be for road repairs. In my very small car I pay around $1.80 or so each week in federal fuel tax (not sure what I pay to the state, but those combined is very likely over $130/yr).
Electric cars pay electricity tax. Gas cars pay gasoline tax. We don’t need to tax electric cars even more.
Which portion of the electricity tax is used to repair the roads they use? Not trying to be too defensive but if we all switched and didn't pay more, the roads would be even worse than they already are.
Whatever % of the general budget goes toward roads. Money is fungible, this has the same answer as: What portion of sales tax pays for roads, what portion of income tax pays for roads, what portion of land tax pays for roads?
The important part here is that you do pay taxes when you charge your EV. We don't need to double tax EVs.
The gullible part is thinking the federal government fixes the roads with your money at all. More than likely it'll go to Israel.
I bet the pick ups will pay less than an EV driver and are one of the main causes of road damages
These particular feds are scheming on privatizing the interstates.
Fuck Congress
What about all the subsidies we pay on gas? Maybe get rid of those if you want some revenue?
But if we stopped subsidizing the richest corporations in the world then the Chinese would win. Is that what you want? /s
This. Countries around the world could save SO much money if they stopped subsidizing the fossil fuel industry. But no, better increase the tax on the middle class...
Miles driven * vehicle weight makes way more sense.
Gas tax should cover the federal subsidies (include military/security costs...) and a carbon tax based on the percentage of total estimated cost of climate change recovery,mitigation, and damage control.
If I remember right, road damage goes up by either the square or the cube of vehicle weight. I like billwashere's suggestion of taxing tire sales - and tax the very heavy tires that semis need proportionally to the damage they cause.
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.
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.
This is climate change denial in action. Any normal country would incentivize people to switch to EVs, not the opposite.
We shouldn’t be subsidizing any form of personal vehicle ownership imo
Unfortunately standard ICE Cars are already heavily subsidized in North America
its to shore up OPEC countries, the ME, and israel by extension all that sweet oil money going into pockets of politicians .
