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.
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.
Fuck Congress
Interesting points to me are the fact that this 130 fee is:
- more than what the average fuel consuming car pay (70-90)
- Is on top of what many people already pay in state taxes to drive their car
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.
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
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.
American economy can’t run without oil
What about all the subsidies we pay on gas? Maybe get rid of those if you want some revenue?
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…
This is climate change denial in action. Any normal country would incentivize people to switch to EVs, not the opposite.
If you look at temperature data for the past 15,000yrs or so you’d see that we are in the Holocene with a great temperature for humans to survive. The temperature for the duration of the Holocene period fluctuates a little which is the climate change we’re seeing. The scale is so small though that the climate change we’re seeing isn’t meaningful to any greater change and infact we’re on a downward trend within the fluctuation.
Now all that is not to say that we shouldn’t take measures to not destroy our environment, because we should care about our planet. There are so many more important and more immediate things to be worrying about than this grand idea of climate change, such as the magnetic pole shift
its to shore up OPEC countries, the ME, and israel by extension all that sweet oil money going into pockets of politicians .
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.
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.
they want you trapped in the fossil fuel death spiral
its like the coal thing in west virginia they held on to it till thier last dying breath, except its now country wide but with OIL.
Fuel taxes pay for roads. If you don’t buy fuel you don’t help pay for roads to drive your EV on.
EVs already pay electricity tax when they charge. We don’t need to double tax EV ownership.
Fuel taxes pay for roads.
If only other types of taxes could be used to pay for roads… But alas, only gas taxes can be used for that. Entirely different monetary system, that. Roads need gas money and regular money just won’t do.
Other types of taxes are exactly what this article is about. A flat tax for EV owners is their proposed solution to the problem. Sure, other options exist, but people are commenting like this is an insane idea and it’s pretty vanilla.
The proposed EV tax would require almost 20k miles a year in order to break even if you compared a 24 mile/g ICE vehicle. That’s what is stupid about the entire thing. there is a super obvious vendetta and it isn’t to supplement the tax system. How many people put 20k miles on their vehicle a year? I know I’m on the lower end, but I barely got 3k miles over the last 2 years because my car doesn’t have to leave my house much. Back when I had to commute 30 minutes 5 days a week for work, I would do maybe 10k per year. The 24m/g is a the low end as well. Most consumer ICE vehicles are even more fuel efficient than that, with the US national average according to the EPA being 27.1 miles per gallon across all manufacturers in 2023 and that raising to 28.1 by 2025.
With the national annual mileage average being at 13,474 miles (per the federal highway administration). Why should an EV be forced to pay a flat rate that is the equivalent of 22,907.6 miles for an ICE vehicle(assuming national averages). That’s nearly double the price of it’s ice counterpart which doesn’t use a flat rate.
If they were serious about this supplementing the system, it would be based off mileage, since all vehicles require yearly registration with mileage anyway. In my eyes this is clearly intended to push people away from EV’s.
since all vehicles require yearly registration with mileage anyway.
I am 100% certain my state doesn’t keep track of mileage, even superficially, because I have never looked at my odometer for any paperwork reasons.
Registration yes, mileage no, and even emission testing varies by county/city.
When Washington state used to do emissions testing we would take our cars through a place every 2 years where they put test equipment on it. If they could afford to run that whole operation I really don’t see why it wouldn’t work to have electric cars stop at a licensing office once a year for an odometer reading, and base the elecric car fee on the mileage. So simple. There’s no excuse at all for charging all EV drivers the same flat fee no matter how much (or little) we drive. For me the annual fee is twice as much as the gas tax I would pay if I drove a hybrid. That kind of sloppiness is unconscionable.
edit: emissions testing was every 2 years not every year.
Yes that system would work but I’m not sure how you arrived at the conclusion that “inspect every EV in the country” is simpler than “flat tax on EVs”. Running inspections at that scale seems multiple orders of magnitude more complex than a one time fee.
- No, I’m talking about Washington state. How other states do it is none of my business.
- No, I never said taking odometer readings was simpler than collecting a flat fee, I said it was fair and a flat fee is unfair.
Charging a flat gas tax would be simpler than metering every gallon of gasoline sold, but it wouldn’t be fair, and we don’t do that. So why should we do it for EVs?
Oregon has a pay-per-mile system that would be more fair, IMO. Not sure if they still have it but at one point, they let you choose between having a tracker or just self-reporting your mileage.Makes sense if you use the road less, you should pay less and vice-versa.
Flat tax just spreads the estimated additional wear and cost around to everyone, like going out to dinner with a group and splitting the bill evenly vs just paying for what you ordered. I’d rather just pay for what I ordered.
14,500 miles driven here mostly for work and family. Even if it was 5 cents a mile that’d be $700+ in taxes a year just to operate a vehicle. What’s really funny is how dependent our American cities are on cars, you’re stuck needing one, but eventually you won’t afford one due to taxes.
“fair” is often ascribed to pay as you go (and flat taxes) flat taxes, but they are both biased toward working people. Add road maintenance budget to progressive income tax and make rich people pay a bigger share. they can afford it.
Oh agreed I’m all for making the rich pay their fair share. If they did maybe this wouldn’t even be a topic worth much discussion
More fair would be to pay for road wear and tear. Bigger cars do more damage to roads, and semis do exponentially more. Drop the gas tax and charge per mile scaled to the weight of your half loaded vehicle.
You should see the damage farm equipment causes.
I pay my EV fee ($175 every year) even tho I barely drive, which is why I got an EV (old car needed to be replaced anyway). In the last year prior to getting an EV, I filled up my 10-gallon tank maybe four times. At 18 cents per gallon I probably paid $8 toward road repair via gas taxes, so I’m paying way way way more now. Farm equipment doesn’t pay shit to fix the copious damages they cause going between their fields, since most of their gas use isn’t on the roads and many large farms have their own fuel pumps and buy bulk.
I like your proposal, but I’d add a HUGE flat fee to large farm equipment, or just entirely ban it from paved roads, where it very specifically is not meant to be.
pay as you go and flat taxes are biased toward working people. Add this to progressive income tax and make rich people pay a bigger share. they can afford it.
I own an EV and already pay an extra road tax for having an EV to my state, on top of more for tires, more for insurance, more for repairs, and more for public fast charging thanks to the government’s failure to build up charging infrastructure at a decent pace. Why should I pay another tax to the federal government?
The “if things weren’t insane right now” answer is that state taxes don’t directly go to support the federal highway system, that’s funded through things like gas tax as well. The current real answer is “fuck you and your tamed lightning car, liberal”
Kinda figured it was something like that, in both cases lol
Duh, the issue here is it’s a flat rate. It should just be calculated by mileage driven.
You could do that but it’s considerably more complicated than a flat tax. I would much rather pay a flat fee to not have to deal with inspections and/or tracking mileage.
Presumably your car has an annual safety inspection. The inspection could include writing down your milage, right? I’m pretty sure there are already laws against tampering with your odometer…
No, there are no annual safety inspections. Some states do emissions tests but mine does not and EVs would obviously be excluded from those anyway.
I’m so sorry. It must be terrifying knowing how many of your fellow drivers are zipping around with worn brake pads or broken turn signals. 😬
Are there no vehicle taxes in the US?
It’s the US we get taxed on everything, it just isn’t always obvious.
You pay to renew your vehicle registration. At which time you may also have to get smog tested, it’s not every year.
Fuel tax only pays 25% of the cost of roads.
People could just buy EV SUVs and Pickup trucks so the degrading road infrastructure would be less of an issue.
Or they could order doordash once less a month and put that money towards the common good.
Sam Graves, Republican of Missouri, Wants You To Pay $130 A Year Just To Drive An Electric Car
FTFY
But is $130 actually fair?
Well, a flat fee doesn’t take into account vehicle weight or annual mileage, which the gas tax more-or-less does. And the road maintenance cost is a function of those two things. A flat fee would penalize drivers of infrequently-driven small vehicles.
But…I suppose that gathering that data would also add some privacy concerns and costs, like the government needing to record how many miles your vehicle has traveled in a year.
EDIT: The really obnoxious thing is that everyone else is grabbing movement data on vehicles to make money off. Automakers via integrated cell radios. ALPR network operators. I assume that charging station operators do too — fast DC connections like NACS transmit the vehicle’s VIN, and I’d be very surprised if charging companies aren’t monetizing that data.
You could tax tires, it avoids all the tracking while still distributing road maintenance costs based off actual use of the roads.
That’s an interesting thought.
thinks
Tax revenue would be less-frequent, and there might be potential to create a misincentive to encourage people to unsafely drive on threadbare tires longer than they otherwise would. But I could see that being done.
Include tire checks with thread depth minimums in the annual or semiannual registration renewal.
Seems like a basic safety precaution too. Getting bad tires off the road means less accidents.
All this sounds good in theory, but I guess fuck me if I get a puncture. Buy a tire and because you’ll often need two for even wear I get to pay the equivalent of gas tax for 50k miles.
Prorate the tax based on used tread? If you only burned through 10% of the tire before replacing it - pay 10% of the tax.
Personally more of a fan of a pay per mile system but this is actually a really cool sounding alternative.
Or … we could just not tax electric vehicles, and call that a subsidy to encourage the more environmentally friendly option.
If, at some future point, electric vehicle adoption becomes so widespread that it becomes difficult to provide road maintenance because gas taxes aren’t being paid anymore, then you can find a different funding source for it. Maybe just fund it out of the ordinary general tax fund. Or even go really crazy and raise taxes on billionaires by two hundredths of a percent.
It is always far easier to accept a new change if it is combined with a group of larger changes, than to try and implement a new change on it’s own.
If this type of tax had been implemented right from the start when modern EVs came on the market it would simply be a small part of the calculation of owning an EV.
Waiting until now, and you get this kind of response, waiting further will not improve the public opinion.
Damage to the road scales with axle load using a fourth power. Yes a fourth power. So an average truck does roughly 3000x more damage to road surfaces than an average EV.
Yet, weather influences account for the majority of road wear, so the weight of cars really does not matter at all.
I’m aware that vehicle weight is the mechanism to tax cars in many countries, but within groups this makes little sense if it is to compensate for road wear. Whether its fair to exempt EVs from road taxes is a different story, and depends on other externalities and the type of travel behaviour a government wants to promote.
Playing devils advocate the average weight of an ev is roughly a 1000lbs more than an equivalent ice car.
The weight of an average truck is roughly 80.000lbs more. Now add a power of 4 to that.
Commercial vehicle taxes are already scaled by weight and milage.
A flat fee would penalize drivers of infrequently-driven small vehicles.
This is one of the reasons that causes me to pause whenever I’ve considered purchasing one. My state also has a yearly fee.
I work from home and don’t drive to justify these fees so I just keep my long ago paid off vehicle well maintained for a fraction of the cost of a car payment.
Sounds good… who do I pay $130/year to to get to drive an EV?
Trump :(
