I don’t know the correct answer to this exactly, but given that I’ve only driven my car (hybrid) about 4k miles total over the last 2 years since I got it (April '24), and paid less (but not $0) in gas tax, but still got hit with the full $130 extra fee is absolutely infuriating. I hadn’t even owned it a full year yet but still had to pay a non pro-rated amount (my previous car was a regular gas car).
I’m basically paying almost 6x the rate per mile since I drive so little. I’m the one stuck paying extra because I can’t afford to drive enough to justify the full amount, and subsidizing some high mileage driver out there.
I realize tracking mileage has privacy implications, so I don’t know a perfect solution, but it fucking SUCKS to get ripped off this hard. While being on disability due to injury and other surgeries, too. I mean I’m still building strength and endurance back to be capable of working again, preferably this year, but I’m the meantime, taxes are fucking killing me.
At least with an EV I would have 0 in gas taxes instead of paying the “not paying gas tax” fee on top of the gas tax- while gas is almost $5 a gallon.
So much bullshit.
It’s never an option to tax the megacorporations that force us to use public roads that they don’t pay for to get to work is it?
Good ol corporate socialism. Privatize the gains and socialize the losses.
Tax the megacorps more and use that to maintain roads and expand public transit providing an actual choice for people rather than forcing the individual to buy a car, pay for maintenance, for registration, for fuel, for a license, for tolls, all just to get to work.
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.
Tolls already handle the mileage part, and they already have different tolls per vehicle class, though the classes are outdated. But that can easily be adjusted.
The only downside of tolls is that they track your vehicle movement, but let’s not kid ourselves, flock cameras already track your movement to your neighborhood, and it’s run by an openly comically evil company.
Give us cross country high speed rail and you got a deal.
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).
Fuck the petroloids they can and should pay for my roads
If you’re not paying for it, it’s not yours.
True, though paying for it is no guarantee of ownership in this modern era, either.
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.
People already run tires that are worn well past the point of safety, making them more expensive will exacerbate that issue.
You’re not wrong, but this would still happen if you’re were free. People just can’t be arsed to do anything.
Probably a much lower rate, but still.
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.
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.
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.
How many miles to pay $130 in federal taxes?
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.
Rich people with summer homes in another state are likely not a major percentage of drivers, I’m guessing.
You don’t have to be rich to register your vehicle in Montanna. It happens all the time in California to avoid smog and taxes.
Also, just because the rich are a small percentage of the population obviously doesn’t mean they should be taxed less, that’s a wild statement.
California is actually going after people registering in Montana when their primary residence is California.
Just like NYC does for people who claim they don’t live in the city to avoid taxes
That wasn’t his statement, though. He was saying that the super-rich are a tiny outlier group, so even an infrastructure personal tax that they manage to avoid will have minimal impact on the system at large, because they are so small that even heavy abuse in this scenario is a rounding error.
I think he is insinuating that a system that works but allows tiny groups to fall through the cracks would still be acceptable for this, which I tend to agree with.
It is much like in the past when welfare recipients were vilified because a tiny number of its users found a way to qualify even though they made a bit too much money for it, or managed to double dip somehow to get more than was intended. The system still fills a need and more or less works (its grievous underfunding and paperwork hell notwithstanding) and is far better than nothing, so the statistically insignificant amount of fraud or evasion is an acceptable cost to people that understand statistics and are speaking in good faith.
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.
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.
Well that sounds like they should implement a tax on energy used to power EV.
Easy enough to implement at paid charge stations. Both homes I’ve had chargers installed at are on programs where the utility knows exactly how much energy my EV charger uses.
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.
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…
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.
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
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…
Most states already have yearly vehicle inspections. It wouldn’t be hard to include mileage metering in that. It wouldn’t surprise me if it already does. I have to get my car inspected before I pay my vehicle tax anyways, so it isn’t a complicated addition.
Fuck Congress
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.
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.
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?
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.
I didn’t realize there was states out there that didn’t require mileage on their registration. I’ve never been in one that didn’t. I know there was some that don’t require mileage if the vehicle’s older than 10 years old, but I didn’t realize there was some that just straight out didn’t.
regardless it’s a nuisance, if you’re still doing an annual registration, that system still works. You just supply your mileage when you register.
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.
You’re right, this is why what we really need to do is tax the rich and make them pay their fair share while also moving off a car-dependent infrastructure.
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.
As much of a pain in the ass, that would be to implement, I agree. I do believe that vehicle weight has some contributing factors.
Plus, moving it to the odometer system would remove the necessity of having a privatized company manage it(hence lowering complexity and cost from that company) and it would then be run by a government service
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.
“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
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.
That’s a great idea that I fully support. Unfortunately, you and I both know it will never happen.
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?
This is a whole different argument that I never really mentioned, but that is correct. This is a federal tax, meaning it would stack on top of any type of state tax.
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
End gasoline and oil subsidies by taxpayers and put them into the road budget.
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…
Yeah, unfortunately most states don’t have a yearly inspection. There’s registration, but outside of the New England area and select western states, there’s no real inspection requirements.
It was really surreal going to Florida for the first time and seeing people driving around with bumpers hanging off their vehicle and seeing my aunt driving around with tires so bald that I was surprised it could grip the road
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. 😬
Only 14/50 US states do safety inspections. Wheels fly off and hit someone every fucking day. Because freedom.
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.
EVs already pay electricity tax when they charge. We don’t need to double tax EV ownership.
Fuel tax only pays 25% of the cost of 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 .
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
Dudes out here telling us not to worry about climate change contradicting the entire scientific community, and the mountain of evidence to the contrary.
Great job douche bag, you should apply to become a fossil fuel CEO, you’d fit right in.
Didn’t expect to see one of you types in the fediverse.
No, you’re wrong. Human induced climate change and its dangers are all very real. Sure, the news reporting is sensationalist, but the facts are all there for you to check out, science going back almost a century.
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.
Sam Graves, Federal Congress 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.
People already wait way too long to replace tires due to their cost. We didn’t need to increase that hazard.
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.
My Bolt EV weighs like 3600 pounds, about 400 pounds more than my old ICE Honda Accord. Maybe we should tax vehicles based on manufacturer spec curb weight. That might push demand for smaller, lighter, more efficient cars.
I genuinely agree with this. It would help curb the push for monster trucks with less veiw than abram tanks.
Only in the US where people demand stupid battery packs because of range anxiety because they can’t do math.
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.
