As with any big change, the transition towards electric cars comes with joys as well as challenges. The cars themselves are marvellously smooth and low-maintenance, but public charging still isn’t as ubiquitous as fuel stations, the cars themselves are expensive, and then there’s the governance of the whole thing. With electric cars not using fuel, what will replace the fuel tax? The United Kingdom has a potential answer, and some people aren’t happy about it.
Like in many jurisdictions, the United Kingdom uses a fuel tax as one method of raising government funding. Currently, this tax stands at 52.95 pence per liter of petrol, or about $2.65 per U.S. gallon of gasoline at the time of writing. While not all of this duty collected goes directly towards road building and maintenance, some of it does, so drivers of combustion-powered vehicles pay into the system as they consume fuel, in addition to paying road tax.
Of course, while owners of electric vehicles also now have to pay road tax of £195 per vehicle, fuel tax doesn’t apply to electricity. With a mandate that all new cars sold in the United Kingdom be electric by 2035, as the passenger car fleet switches over from fossil fuels to electricity, revenue accrued through fuel tax will plummet dramatically. So, how does the government plan to make up for this shortfall? Well, here’s what BBC News says:
According to the Telegraph, EV drivers could be charged 3p per mile, on top of other road taxes, amounting to an extra £12 on a journey from London to Edinburgh. Drivers of hybrid cars would also be charged, but at a lower rate.
The paper says the idea is that owners would have to estimate, and pay for, their road usage for the year ahead. If, at the end of the year, they had driven fewer miles they would have a credit to carry over, but if they had driven more they would face a top-up charge.
Yep, the plan is reportedly to explore a per-mile levy on electric vehicles, and while it’s a bit of a shock, some sort of mileage tax on EVs to pay for infrastructure is inevitable. At first glance, it doesn’t take a lot of math to realize that this proposal might not be as drastic as it seems.
Firstly, it would take a wildly efficient combustion-powered vehicle to level the playing field between the 52.95 pence-per-liter fuel tax and the proposed three pence-per-mile EV tax. We’re talking overall consumption of 28.24 kilometers-per-liter, or about 66.4 miles per-U.S.-gallon. Short of the tiniest little hybrid hatchbacks, there isn’t much out there capable of that in the real world.
Secondly, the idea of self-reporting seems inefficient, but there is theoretically a way to verify if some vehicle owners have gone over or under their initial estimation. Every year, vehicles between three and 40 years old must pass an annual MOT inspection, during which the vehicle’s mileage readout is logged and kept in a database. For electric vehicles that fall within the MOT window, the existing test could be used as a reference for the proposed per-mile charge.
While the proposed charge doesn’t sound wildly onerous, the industry has responded exactly the way you’d expect. Unsurprisingly, the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders isn’t particularly pleased by news of a new potential tax, issuing the following statement:
We recognise the need for a new approach to motoring taxes but at such a pivotal moment in the UK’s EV transition, this would be entirely the wrong measure at the wrong time. Introducing such a complex, costly regime that targets the very vehicles manufacturers are challenged to sell would be a strategic mistake – deterring consumers and further undermining industry’s ability to meet ZEV mandate targets, with significant ramifications for perceptions of the UK as a place to invest. A smarter, fair and future-ready taxation system requires a fundamental rethink – one that must be done in full partnership with the industry and other stakeholders.
Although talk of investment is a big thing to throw around, the consumer deterrence brought up in the statement is a fair point. Electric cars are still expensive, frequently commanding a premium over their fossil-fuelled counterparts that’s possible to make up on running costs but has to be paid upfront. Add in higher-than-average depreciation, and many drivers would have a hard time stomaching affordability. Still, we are talking such a small sum overall that, when combined with an ultra-low overnight electricity tariff, it would theoretically remain far less expensive to run an electric vehicle than a combustion-powered car. However, fear isn’t rational. As AA president Edmund King told BBC News, the government should “tread carefully unless their actions slow down the transition to EVs.”
A rethink of fuel tax will absolutely be needed at some point, not just in Britain but all over the world. How that comes to be will not be an easy road, but it’s a conversation countries need to be having now. It’s also a conversation that requires fact, context, and nuance. No one ever said this would be easy, and perhaps the most contentious part of the EV shift is yet to come.
Top graphic image: MG
My state adds $200 to the annual registration fee for EV and PHEV. I don’t mind paying my share, and when I did the math compared to the gas I’d bought over the 5 years previous to getting an EV, I’m actually coming out ahead. Also consider that this only replaces the STATE gas tax – I’m not paying the federal gas tax at all.
With 2 EVs and a PHEV, and birthdays close together, we need $745 in short order. Not as difficult now as it used to be for us but there were some years it was a bit of struggle.
Every car should pay by the mile. If we want a separate tax for transportation then we should tax it directly. The more you drive the more you pay.
Taxing fuel simply doesn’t make sense – why should someone driving a base Honda Civic pay 40% more per mile than someone driving a Civic Hybrid? They take up the same amount of space on the road.
If we’re going with the ‘take up space’ angle, we should also factor in vehicle size and weight. A Honda Fit shouldn’t have to pay as much as a Honda Pilot.
100%. Let all of the dads in my neighborhood with their unnecessary Silverados, F-150s, and Rams pay more for fixing potholes. My sedan is portly for what it is, but 3850 lbs =/= 5,000 lbs (or more).
There is basically no difference is road wear between you sedan and a truck. 95% of weight related road damage is done by commercial trucks.
The biggest way light duty vehicles damage roads is with studded tires – which should be banned. Tired of driving on roads with grooves in the concrete caused by studs.
According to the math I’ve always heard, the delta in weight between vehicles significantly impacts road wear. Maybe the math is old (I think the study is from the 1950’s), but if it’s correct, then the 5k lb truck does nearly 3x the road wear as my sedan.
Bump that truck up to 5500 lbs as some upper trims are, and it’s 4x the wear.
https://www.reddit.com/r/australia/comments/10rb361/heavier_vehicles_damage_our_roads_more_than_you/
It reminds me of a debate I had with a former coworker years ago about registration costs of motorcycles and cars. I was complaining about the fact that my motorcycle actually cost more to register than my 3/4 ton truck or sedan simply because it was newer (age based fee that goes toward road maintenance not tied in any way to vehicle value). He couldn’t understand that my issue was that I was effectively subsidizing his car usage and winter maintenance through paying an outsized road maintenance fee relative to the demands and wear caused by that vehicle (keep in mind, I also had two other vehicles so its save to say I was paying more than my “fair share”).
The formula for weight based road damage is y=x^4. It is the 4th power of axle load. So a 10 ton axle on a semi does 10,000 times more road damage than a 1 ton axle on a passenger car.
So, yes, a truck does multiple times more road damage than sedan but neither does much damage in the big picture when our roads are designed for 80,000 lb semi trucks. It is like arguing if a skinny man or fat man jumping up and down on a driveway does more damage.
I wish we could post pictures but if you ask a chat bot to graph y=x^4 you will see what I’m talking about. People argue about the variation in damage in the first 20% on left side of the graph where the line is almost flat instead of the 20% on the right side of the graph where the line is approaching vertical.
I saw something a while back that indicated that the old study from the 50s or 60s that showed road wear being proportional to axle weight ^4 was only applicable to certain scenarios, and that it is likely closer to weight^3 for most roads. So still a lot more with increasing weight, but quite a bit less than the 4th power rule.
Regardless of the exact math, an 8000 lb truck should still be paying ~10x per mileage as a 4000 lb car, whether it is increasing the fee from $100 to $1000, or $1 to $10. There are a lot of roads, probably the vast majority, that are local and not build for 80000 lb trucks, and do not see much more than passenger vehicle traffic, and for those roads the difference in wear from a pickup to a small car would be significant.
A road that doesn’t see heavy truck traffic isn’t going to have much weight related damage at all.
Even on highways the primary driver of road damage is weather not traffic.
I suppose my point of view is that since we aren’t able to make the weather pay for wearing out our roads, it is irrelevant to the conversation.
What we’re discussing is what we can put a usage tax on – and that his vehicles. Even if a 4000lb car and a 6000lb truck are both dwarfed in road wear compared to a garbage truck, here are the facts:
1) Both trucks and cars DO use public roads.
2) Trucks DO cause 3-5x as much road wear as cars.
3) Trucks DO NOT get charged 3-5x as much as cars for road wear.
That said, I get that your point is that the wear X caused by either a truck or a car is so small that both X and 5X are insignificant. But there has to be a point Y in which YX becomes significant. Is it a 6500lb TRX? A 7,500lb Superduty? A 9,000lb Hummer EV? At some point it matters, and if any government moves to charging per mile, there should absolutely be pricing tiers based on weight that are backed up by math.
Oregon has already done this.
We have a flat road usage charge for light duty vehicles of 1.8 cents per mile. (This is optional today but will be mandatory in 2027)
For commercial vehicles 26,001 lbs and over we have fee per mile based on weight that starts at 7.6 cents per mile and goes to 35.3 cents per mile. It also varies based on number of axles.
For commercial vehicles over 8,000 lbs there is also a weight component of registration fees that varies from $74 to $1295 per year
735-6013
735-9928-2024.pdf
weight+miles should be the qualifiers. I don’t think space matters so much. If you want to take it further you could do it by PSI to the ground. My weight comment is because of road damage. So if you are a light footprint non-damaging vehicle you should pay less than a similar sized but much heavier vehicle for the same amount of miles traveled. I have no idea how to compute these things into real numbers tho, that’s for smart people.
The difference in weight related road damage is the difference in axle weight to the power of 4. Yes, there is a tiny difference between a civic and F-150 but all the actual damage comes from commercial vehicles that weigh tens of thousands of pounds.
You absolutely could factor in weight but for light duty vehicles the difference in fees would be tiny fractions of a penny.
The problem is that if the government did that a large number of people simply would refuse to believe the difference in damage done between a Suburban and Corolla is a rounding error.
Help me understand why this is true.
It comes down to how the roads are designed. When we design roads to handle vehicles that weight 80,000 – 105,000 lbs the difference between a 4,000 lb Civic and a 7,600 lb Suburban doesn’t matter.
When a vehicle drives on a road there is basically a wave. The wheel compresses the road and then it spring back once the wheel passes. Over time that constant flexing of the road causes it to break down. Light duty vehicles don’t put enough force into the road to get much if any of compression that causes the damage over time.
Makes sense. Thanks!
“weight+miles should be the qualifiers. I don’t think space matters so much”
Space does matter in the city… particularly in street parking situations.
Poor wording on my part. My point is why should the same model car pay different amounts to use the road?
Ah, gotcha
“ The United Kingdom Reportedly Wants To Tax Electric Cars By The Mile And Now Everyone’s Upset”
I’m in the UK, and I’m not upset. I’m, well this is probably overstating my feelings, but ambivalent is close enough.
I can see at some point in the future the government will want trackers in the cars to avoid the obvious mileage fraud, and I don’t really care about that either. They’re really going to miss at the income from speeding fines though.
the tracker will fine you as you go, don’t worry mate. You seem to embrace the overlords tho, so you do you!
I’m already surrounded by average speed camera zones and ANPR cameras. Nothing I could do about it, and I assume it’s cut down on uninsured/banned/tax-dodging drivers. It’s certainly stopped most of the speeding.
My wife can track me already, and she does almost nothing with that data. I can’t see how anyone else would care where I am or what I’m doing.
Plus of course I don’t have an EV, so I’ll carry on paying tax the old fashioned way by putting fuel in my cars and bike.
Seems logical to me; pay for the mileage you drive in a year. Of course people are going to be unhappy. Someone will always be unhappy no matter what is proposed.
Should be 1,5p per vehicle ton per mile. It would feel very unfair if the hummer EV pays as much tax as the dacia spring or the clio.
If you live in a country with a lot of toll roads then any pay-per-mile or even pay-per-month feels bad. You already pay for the road, and then you have to pay more.
So if they would want to introduce pay per-mile they (the gov’d) also has to figure out how to deal with toll roads which are often NOT maintained by the gov’d but a private party. Now in some countries this is probably less of an issue.
Back to regular countries ; pay per mile/kilogram/lbs is of course the fairest. But it will make road transport by truck extremely expensive since trucks weigh easily 10, 20, 40 times heavier than cars. It would still be fair since trucks do damage the roads way more than regular cars. Period.
It would also force, some countries, to look into alternative ways of moving goods, e.g. by trains, drones, cheaper/lighter trucks, autonomous trucks/vehicles etc. Easier said than done, yes, I know. But do we want to keep polluting OUR air with all kind of stuff which really isn’t good for our health? Guess not.
Back to the pay-per-mile. Doing a yearly check at the MOT asks for ppl doing ‘things’ to the ECU and suddenly they drove 50% less that year. Unless there are -regular- checks, like once per month, there will be plenty of people going to cheat the system, especially when it’s hundreds of dollars, pounds or euros per year. And we all know the modern ECUs are easy to modify – anything with a digital display basically.
Car manufacturers can then of course try to block that, close it, make it more ‘secure’ – some cars will be more prone to changes and thus those ppl will pay less.
A block box system? No thanks – that’s also not cool. No need for the gov’d to know when I drove my car, where I drove my car etc – history tells us that not all (future) goverments are friendly, so better not to let them map out all your connections by just reading your car history.
I think some sort of broadcast system would work. At a lot of places in the country receivers could be set up. The cars send out infrequently how many miles they have driven. It would not need to use the 4G network, it could be LORA or something else pretty low budget. Because of the frequent (once a day, once per hour, once per week?) updates, there is less or no chance to cheat the system (unless you’d hack the sending of data as well, but I can see a way to use pretty good encryption for that to be solid). That combined with the regular cameras which will recognize license plates, which could be cross-checked (car said drove just 10 miles last week, but it was actually spotted at two points, over 100 miles away from each other – ok let’s dive into the data a bit more or something like that).
However, the problem is that PETROL (gasoline, gas etc) would have to become much cheaper. Instantly. And any ICE car would have to get that system. Else it will be a Big Problem to transition. You cannot ask EV owners to pay per mile while the gas guys can drive as much as they want. For two reasons ; in cities ICE cars are not fuel efficient so they pay per mile way more than EVs which are very efficient in cities. On highways the EVs are less efficient (relatively) than ICE cars so you’d get in a situation where the long distance long mile running cars and trucks would want to KEEP using old fashioned hydrocarbons and only the people in the city, who technically could do fine with shared cars, Ubers/Lyft/Didi and … public transportation, would be buying and using expensive (EV) cars and using plenty of electricity to often just move one person, create congestion, use parking places where space is at a premium and and thus ‘waste’ a lot of resources.
If you drive just 3 km/2 miles a day in an EV in a city, to work, or the daycare center or whatever, then you’d pay near NOTHING in a pay-per-mile system, but you’d be wasting so many unnecessary resources. The car. Space. Electricity. It would save you so much, you’d have enough to buy a SECOND car for the long distance trips. And a lot of households already have such a situation. Two cars. Not certain if that is what we should aim for.
Anyways, pay-per-mile (with weight in the formula) is the fairest. Implementation will be complicated. Niches/shortcuts/cheating will be there and hard to weed out. In reality the gov’d will probably find ways to basically punish everyone for having an ICE or EV car.
People still pay gas tax when they drive on toll roads?
The toll roads aren’t maintained by the gov’d in general. They’re often private parties who either build the whole toll road or who are maintaining the road. So when you’re driving on the toll road, you should not have to pay-per-mile on top of that. The money for ‘pay per mile’ doesn’t go to the owners of the toll road. It would be free money for the government.
Imagine you live near a toll-road entrance and your work is at an exit. You’d be driving 99% of your time on a toll road. You’re paying toll. Why would you have to pay a road tax on top of that – you’re not using any ‘government’ roads.
“Why would you have to pay a road tax on top of that – you’re not using any ‘government’ roads.”
Because that is how toll roads work, privatize the profits. As such I would never vote to allow any toll roads, and would vote out of office any politician who wanted to build them. If you have toll roads expect to pay twice, because people today are already paying twice.
Yeah it sucks. In some countries, though, the only way to finance some new (needed) highways is to get private companies in. They basically buy the ‘license’ to literally pave a road and then are allowed to collect tolls for say 20 years. You see this for example in France, where the toll road “Autoroute Du Soleil” (the highway of sun) was build very early (50s, some parts during the war!) and has been maintained very well (from Paris all the way south to the Mediterranean sea). The asphalt/black top was superb when we drove there in the late 80s. The toll fees were substantial, think dozens of dollars, back then, for a stretch less than 500 miles. But it drove well, unless there were the famous french traffic jams in the summer, with some jams being 100+ miles long (!). Outside those date specific traffic jams it was great to drive. I think they had a 87 mph speed limit, but I cannot recall well.
So for once a year for a holiday, such a toll road is -fine-. If you have to take it every month or week then you’re in for a less than pleasant financial surprise.
So in the end – no toll roads should not be there unless in extremely rare circumstances. Like some express road directly to an airport to bypass typical traffic jams. Like a ‘parallel road’ without any on/off ramps etc to make sure you can catch a flight on time and when you land you can get back into town quickly.
But there should be a reasonable alternative. In France there is no alternative. You could drive the ‘B’ roads from north to south, but then you’d be a) driving like twice or even three times the hours b) the distance would be more due to local roads not going in straight lines like highways and c) you’d burn a ton more fuel due to distance, the longer time to drive and often more elevation changes.
I understand roads aren’t cheap, but still I feel most governments have some sort of anti-road stance. Some 4 lane roads (2 each way) have not been widened for 30 years, while traffic has increased not just two fold but in some cases like three, four or five fold. Cramming people in public transportation is fine – if it is AS fast, AS cheap and AS convenient and often it is none of these three.
I live in Michigan where there are no toll roads, but the neighboring states do including around Chicago. If you go visit and forget to pay on the website within 14 days after they take a picture of your license plate they will send you a bill in the mail with late fees added on that doubles the price. When I go to visit my wife’s parents in Indiana, I take a slightly longer more rural route to avoid tolls. They have a yearly pass so it easier for them to take the toll road when coming to visit us.
Michigan also has terrible roads and has been looking for ways to pay for the roads for years. Tolls are always suggested but they are so unpopular as to be political suicide. Michigan not having tolls like Illinois or Ohio does is part of people’s identity or something, and people get heated about it. Telling people in a bar that you think toll roads are a good idea is a quick way to start a fight.
The road funding issue was recently solved. The solution was to raise EV registrations slightly, and also impose a 40% wholesale tax on cannabis. Something like 40% of all sales occur in stores near the state line where it is illegal on the other side, so the idea is to get drug dealers from other states to pay for our roads in this state. Everybody wants somebody else to pay. Do not cry for us because cannabis extract is like $3 per gram wholesale, we will be good.
Oh I never said toll roads are good. I see them as a double tax on something which should be provided by the government in the first place, since they already have and use petrol and road tax. And on top of that the buyer of a second hand car has to pay sales tax, like why? For what?
IMHO car owners have been milked by governments for decades. So if they implement any pay-per-mile system, toll road fees have to be revised or the miles driven on toll roads should be removed for the pay-per-mile system.
You nailed a ton of points. Good comment.
They do this in New Zealand for evs, diesels and PHEVs (although PHEVs pay 50% of the cost that EVs do due to the fact that they are also purchasing petrol). The reason diesel has historically been taxed this way is that so much diesel is used in agriculture, forestry and marine that it would be insane to make them pay for road maintenance. It also means we don’t have to worry about having “red diesel” like they do in the uk and therefore no one is avoiding road user charges.
The government is looking to remove road user charges from petrol pumps and move petrol cars to a user pays system like EVs and diesels to make it fair. As it should be. They can also change the amount they charge per k/m based on the weight of a vehicle. A heavy truck weighs a lot more than VW golf TDi which puts more wear and tear on the road and as such they pay different rates per k/m.
By moving all cars to a user pays system rather than a tax at the pump it’s far less punitive to people driving older inefficient vehicles, they will only pay for their distance rather than being literally taxed for not being able to afford a newer car.
Moral of the story. No matter what kind of vehicle taxation system is used, some folks will feel cheated. I don’t think a system that feels 100% fair to everyone paying into is actually feasible in all honesty.
Lots of US states are considering per mile taxes too so the UK doing it is a surprising as rain in Portland. The only surprise is how burdensome UK car and fuel taxes are considering how car dependent the UK is outside of cities and how many commuters and work vehicles are hot with congestion charges
I oppose per mile taxes as government surveillance and a potential restriction on movement.
By comparison fuel tax in Oregon is $0.56/gallon and a 2 year car registration is $125‐160 for ICE and $316 for EV, or there is a per mile program. Portlanders get stuck with a $112 county surcharge on top of that.
Oregon also has the option of a fee per mile road usage charge.
If you choose that option you pay $86 for an 2 year EV or hybrid registration and then 1.8 cents per mile. If I did my math correctly the break even is about 7,200 miles per year for an EV.
So eliminate fuel taxes and charge by distance times the fourth power of the axle load. I would switch to that in a heartbeat.
It would much more fair and would have all sorts of of positive effects.
Please.
That is the fair way to do it. Will never pass though.
Why can’t they just tax electricity usage at the charger?
That would work. But they have to do it at home too. And break off the car part from the rest. And then there is regenerative. Using actual mileage seems easier and fairer.
Fuel tax isn’t charged by mileage. It is charged at purchase. I can fuel up my car and leave it sitting for months and years unused and the tax collected is the same.
The same theory should be used for electricity for cars.
I get your point but it corresponds to mileage. Sure you can fill up and not use it. That probably doesn’t happen too often. I can buy a sandwich and not eat it. But I still paid tax on it even if I keep it in my fridge for a year or throw it out. I’m not sure how you would measure what has been purchased but not used. Then it gets really complicated.
That’s broadly how most taxes are charged anyway. Actual usage taxes are few and far between because there are so many variables to measure usage that it can become inaccurate.
I would agree with that point. But I think this is a particular instance where it can be more accurate as the mileage corresponds so closely to the use. I made the point in another comment somewhere in these comments but I won’t copy/paste
Regen is already taxed when you used the energy the first time.
It’s just recovering energy you already used.
That’s true. I guess it comes down to should more efficient EVs pay less. More efficient ICE cars pay less as they drive further on the same fill up. So efficient EVs (due to better regen, aero, weight, etc) should pay less when they drive further on the same charge up.
BUT, if the goal is to shift from taxing the fuel to taxing road usage, then, then taxing only at charge up would not achieve that. To me, a gov’t should pick one or the other, and road usage seems to be the most fair IMO.
Well it’s not like they tax televisions, oh wait….
And that tax all goes to the BBC regardless of which channels you watch.
Free healthcare though.
Well in the USA, there was a luxury tax on long distance phone service to pay for the Spanish American War, then wars in general, then it was mostly phased out in 2006 because of no wars.
Oh, silly me, no more long distance phone service. Still having wars in spite of the lack of long distance service.
Remember the days of 40 page phone bills?
So how does this work if you drive to France and put a ton of miles outside the UK?
Stop at customs to show your passport and register your mileage on the way out and back into the country? Just a thought. Doesn’t seem like an insurmountable issue.
I have a feeling they would have a hard time convincing the French to cause a big traffic jam at the border just to make it easier for the Brits to collect some taxes.
Maybe. I have not driven through that particular border but my broader point is that with the technology available there’s probably an easy way to do it. Or drive on through and pay for the full mileage. I go through customs all the time. It slows us down.
The French-British border is not so fast to cross anyway. You know, with there being a sea and all.
Yeah, I often think when I’m sat waiting for a ferry to the continent (or Ireland) that it would be utterly unacceptable if there were some sort of a delay.
It works by you getting SCREWED!!!
SCREWED EACH DAY YOU WERE IN FRANCE… AND SCREWED TWICE ON A SUNDAY!!!
and then they screw you at the drive thru
Just tax electricity, my jurisdiction already does it, no need to track miles, no extra administrative waste.
As a bonus more efficient EV’s will end up paying less which is more fair than a flat EV mile tax.
How do they differentiate what goes to your car vs. your clothes dryer? The purpose of the tax is not to collect the tax but rather to distribute it to the roads.
I’m not sure we can assume that is true, if gas taxes were set aside in a trust fund that was only used for fixing roads then I would beleive that. However petrol taxes currently get sucked into the black hole that is the general budget, along with registration taxes, and an assortment of other auto related levies.
If we do assume that is true then for public chargers and apartment chargers that is easy, they are probably already on a seperate meter. Residential customers would be more difficult, they might have a smart charger or might not.
Yeah. I mean that’s the idea. I assume there is a murky stew of gas tax, “other” taxes, federal input (from federal taxes, etc.) someone probably knows where it goes and comes from. I don’t mean to imply it’s simple or clear. And your electric bill spells out the taxes but I don’t know how collecting the charger info works or if it’s even a thing. I’m definitely not trying to suggest it’s a dollar collected/ a dollar spent on roads.
This is inherently fair, especially given EVs tend to be heavier and therefore deal more damage to the road network.
I’m more worried about the slippery slope – the UK doesn’t miss a chance to implement government surveillance. The current proposition asks for self-reporting; how long until they make it a black-box mandatory system for “efficiency” purposes?
Given the track record of the UK here, I’d want to nip this one in the bud early.
In the USA EVs aren’t that much cheaper heavier than the gas burners. 6000 pounds GVWR (2721 kilos, and handful of loose joints for the rest of the world)
I’d be happy to eliminate fuel taxes and tax by charge by distance times the fourth power of the axle load.
The energy used to move a vehicle and the cost to the road infrastructure are just barely related
How did they come up with using a fuel tax as a way to pay for roads anyway? It’s kind of a dumb idea. I mean a fuel tax is fine, the financing roads with it part is the dumb part.
Minnesota charges me an extra $75 on my yearly registration for my Mini Cooper SE. I also didn’t get any tax subsidies from the state or the feds when I bought it.
My proposal is to get rid of any gas or electricity taxes or subsidies as a source of road maintenance income but use them sparingly as incentives to make something economical to scale up, and your registration / tax / whatever it’s called is simply weight * miles * <multiplier>.
I don’t like the use base tax on roads at all. figure out what it costs to maintain the roads put it in the yearly budget and make income tax / corporate taxes pay for it.
Almost all the wear and tear on roads is caused by trucks.
MINI Cooper SE EV weighs around 3,144 pounds
A Ford F250 weighing 6,300 pounds should pay 16 times as much per mile as the MINI
And a semi truck should pay about 10,000 times as much tax per mile as the MINI and 600 or so as much as the F250.
Really, why bother taxing anything less than 4000 pounds, it’s not worth the accounting really.
I’m a big fan of a broad and simple income tax structure designed to fund everything instead of trying to nickel and dime with a bunch of fees.
Not a fan of corporate taxes. Corporations pay no taxes – those are simply passed on to customers. We should give up on the charade and stop taxing companies. Instead we should tax those earnings when they pay out to owners / shareholders and tax investment income the same as W2 earned income. It is also simply ineffective as corporate taxes only make up 7.5% of federal revenue.
“broad and simple income tax structure designed to fund everything instead of trying to nickel and dime with a bunch of fees” I like this.
what about large corporations generating large war chests of cash and capital. Like Tesla having 1 trillion dollars to give away to a CEO. but you do have a point about those taxes being passed down to customers so not sure what the correct approach is. However, if corperations want to be “people” then they can pay their damn taxes! maybe it’s just the pricipal of it all that makes me think the tax man should come after corporations, maybe then they will have less money to give to executives in the first place!
You tax profits when they are distributed. So if Tesla gives Musk $1 trillion in stock he gets to pay 37% income tax on that as well as 15.3% for payroll withholding. No different than an hourly employee getting W2 wages.
Also Tesla isn’t giving Musk $1 trillion in cash (if he even meets the requirements to get that stock) They are creating new shares to give him – which dilutes the value of other shareholders. Paying an executive in stock is much less expensive for a company than paying them cash – which is why so much of executive pay is stock based.
The problem with taxing corporations is that they have entire departments dedicated to tax avoidance and are much more nimble than Congress. Pass a new law and in a few month companies will find a work around. Then Congress will wait another decade to respond. Corporations can shift things around to avoid paying taxes even if that is very inefficient. A company will spend 90 cents to avoid paying $1 in taxes. That tax avoidance adds nothing to our society unless we want to employ a bunch of tax lawyers and accountants.
I’m all for removing a company’s “personhood” in exchange for getting rid of corporate income taxes. I doubt that would be a hard sell.
Dude! great discussion! I don’t claim to be an expert or an economic genius thanks for the back and forth and keeping things sane and not resulting to personal attacks and whatnot.
It is interesting to see how many people’s energy focus on how to dance around tweaking a clearly broken system in society instead of realizing “no wait this entire system is dysfunctional lets nuke it from orbit and start from scratch with an entirely new system.” But yeah that would be an even tougher sell so I guess people just do what they can.
I think a big part of the problem with income tax system is that it is so complicated. Over the the last 40 years especially we have been using the tax code for social engineering. Not only have we replaced many social welfare programs with tax credits or deductions we use it to incentivize other things.
We want you to buy an EV – here is a tax credit. We want you to buy a heat pump or insulate your house – here is a 30% tax credit. We want you to have kids, buy a house, go to college or trade school ….. tax credit, tax credit, tax credit. We also make it maddeningly complicated with income minimums and caps because we are afraid that someone with game the system of get something they don’t “deserve” or need.
Then there are all the special interest credits and reduction that get worked into the system that make absolutely no sense and are hard to see because the tax code is thousands and thousands of pages.
Paying income taxes should be very simple (and it is in other countries). Simple progressive tax brackets – no deductions. Taxes could be done on an index card in less than 5 minutes.
That said, income taxes are still the best option out there. Sales taxes are very regressive (at least how we do them in the USA)
If you could start over how would you fund government?
I think less individual / discrete income streams. at least directly from citizens. Property taxes, gas taxes, income taxes, hotel tax, taxes on electricity, taxes on playing cards, taxes on liqour, taxes on tobacco, bus tax, airplane ticket tax, sales taxes, tole booths, TARIFFS . I’m sure i missed several
You listed pretty much every major source of taxes: Property, Income, and Sales. How do you fund government without those?
not saying eliminate them all but some sort of consolidation so there are not as many.
Payroll taxes and individual income taxes make up 85% of total federal revenue. You could get rid of the rest of those nickel and dime fees and taxes without effecting much.
Remove the income cap on payroll taxes and get rid of special treatment of capital gains for income taxes and we have a very simple and progressive tax code that covers everything.
sounds good to me!
North Carolina adds a flat $214 a year to registration for EVs($107.25 for PHEVs so yay me on getting a PHEV that can still do my entire commute in EV mode after losing my Bolt)
This if fine for our daily drivers but I have my 2000 Ranger that I do not use for commuting, just for household truck things, so I would welcome a per mile fee instead of the flat fee. We have inspections every year before we can re-register, unless the car is over 30 years old, and there aren’t many EVs that old.
It’d be a simple solution to go by the reported mileage at inspection, charge the usage based on a reasonable equivalent mpg, heck even a non-equivalent mpg, say 50mpg, the current gas tax is 40.3 cents per gallon, so if I travel 1,000 miles a year in my Ranger, divided by 50 is 20, times 40.3 cents is $8.06, a much more reasonable number. For my daily commuter, I do about 10k a year, that would still only work out to about $80 a year, which I guess with having my PHEV now it’s a little closer.
The flat fee is giving me impure thoughts of in a couple years when inspections aren’t a thing, transplanting my electric Ranger bits to a regular 97 model and accidentally forgetting to inform the powers that be. Without the EV surcharge, my Ranger’s yearly registration would be less than $100, including the $50 yearly charge for a personalized plate.
I mean, the relatively straightforward solution would be to lower the gas tax and charge all vehicles a per-mile tax
why even have a “use tax” on the roads? the main benifit of the gas tax is to have out of town people help subsidize the cost because they will buy gas while passing through. without that you are better off just figuring out a budget for the roads and fund it through the general fund / income / property taxes / corporate taxes.
Why not? It’s very efficient. The people using roads the most pay more. It’s a public resource that’s unequally used, and should be charged accordingly.
It even works for goods and services since it’ll naturally bake itself into the cost of those.
it it efficient? if you have four different fuel types and have to cajigger a new algorithm for every fuel type and then now everyone feel like they are being screwed by the system. On ‘unequally used’ the ENTIRE economy uses the roads. did you buy a good? well it got to your house using a road at some point. Emergency services need to use roads too and everyone benefits from that. Utilities need to use the roads ect.
Also on “passing on the fuel cost to the buyer” yeah that’s another strike against fuel taxes because not only am I paying the fuel taxes on my personal vehicle but ANY time i buy something I’m also buying that companies fuel taxes the company gets to generate a profit off of paying the taxes.
Also you have these AI companies that are quickly becoming HUGE portions of the economy. If they were to remain large portions (not a bubble) you would have companies such as this not contributing to the maintenance of the infrastructure. Why can’t these virtual / digital companies help contribute to the road maintenance as well considering they benefit from it as well.
It’s about as efficient as it gets for taxation. Sure, my car gets 20 mpg and yours gets 25 so I get screwed. And there are 4 grades of fuel. That’s a rounding error. But it’s only applied to people driving on the roads and not to a car less person taking the bus. Sure the cost of taking the bus is a little higher. But it’s spread out on the efficiency of public transportation. The logic of the AI company paying for it makes no sense. They benefit how? A delivery of product? The delivery company has paid the tax through the fuel tax. The rest of your argument needs to be more thought.
Fuel used has barely any relation to wear on the roads.
Fuel taxes are preposterously regressive
Oregon’s fee per mile takes this into account. Fuel tax is still collected at the pump to out of state tourists still pay.
The fee per mile is based on OBDII data on how many miles are driven in the state of Oregon. Then it calculates fuel used also based on OBDII data and calculates fuel tax paid. Mileage tax – fuel tax already paid = your bill. This is calculated and billed every month.
I participated in Oregon’s early trials of the program and then again later. It worked fine, no issues in the 3 years I took part. It also allowed you to do emission testing from home which was nice.
I don’t understand the resistance to taxing based on vehicle weight. Seems to me that it’s much more ideal, will encourage the right kind of cars, and would be much easier to levy.
I agree 100%. The heavier a vehicle, the more wear and tear it causes to the road system it’s being driven on, no matter what kind of power source the vehicle utilizes.
Quick note, it’s not just weight but how that weight is distributed ,if you compared an identical weight dually and 4 tyre truck the dually will cause less road wear.
But in all honesty none of it really matters much for passenger vehicles, weather causes so much more damage to roads in most places.
Good point. Weather does play hell on roads, too. Especially in areas with weather extremes.
Doesn’t a heavier vehicle use more fuel in general, thus compensating for the additional wear and tear? I mean this isn’t going to come out to the penny, but it seems fairly efficient and fair except for the EV that uses no traditional fuel.
Another good point. I know some states like mine have higher registration renewals for the EV owners. The yearly tag renewal fees for the EV owners in my family are 4 times what I pay for my ice vehicle tags.
A fixed fee seems less fair to me for EVs. So you pay $250 if you hammer out 40,000 miles in an electric Hummer but grandma pays $250 if she puts 68 miles on her electric something something compact?
A semi truck that gets 8 mpg will 600 times as much damage as a pickup that gets 20 mpg and maybe 10,000 times as much damage as a Toyota Prius C that gets .50mpg
It hardly seems fair that the semi only pays around ten times as much fuel tax per mile but 10,000 times as much damage as the Prius.
Why do you oppose all of us from subsidizing private companies for their profits?
You sound commie and you must hate America.
WELL I know I’m a commie.. And since Trump got back into office, hating on America has gotten really REALLY easy…
A 10x heavier vehicle might use 10x the fuel but would cause 10,000 times the wear on the road.
For all practical purposes, all the wear on roads is caused by trucks.
You could do that. The reality is that all light duty vehicles are a rounding error when it comes to weight related road damage. Weight related damage is the difference in weight to the 4th power and based on axle weight.
The difference between a Civic and F-150 would be fractions of a penny per mile. Oregon actually has a fee per mile program for light duty vehicle. It has a fixed rate of 1.8 cents per mile because the difference is tiny. They also have a fee per mile program for commercial trucks and do charge based on weight. A truck weighting 26,001 pays 6 cents per mile while a 80,000 lb truck pays 20 cents per mile.
If only someone has told us this would happen and that at the end of the day EVs would not be as cheap as ICE without all the subsidizing. Of course the ones who will pay want to delay and talk about it while they get their free money. But the free money always runs out and the people getting the freebies want to continue it at other peoples expense. We have heard they are cheaper for years why still subsize it? Frankly as they are so heavy they damage the road more so should pay more. And since they have less repairs and maintenance they pay less tax there as well.
And yet, you lot keep on forgetting all of the subsidies and externalities that make running fossil fuel vehicles artificially cheap
And yet you forgot to mention the $11 to $18 billion subsidies given to 76 programs given to electricity from renewables from 2010 thru 2019 that was far more than the fossil fuel subsidies. These renewables subsidies are in the form of direct financial support while fossil fuel subsidies are in the form of tax breaks in the production on fuel. Is lowering taxes even a subsidy or is it the government saying for now we will take a little bit less of your money?
$18 billion dollars in the span of 9 years is NOTHING compared to the $31 billion PER YEAR that the US government directly gives to the fossil fuel industry.
And that’s not even getting into the additional $730 billion per year in tax breaks and externalities.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/sep/09/fossil-fuels-subisidies-study
https://www.fractracker.org/2025/03/fossil-fuel-subsidies-free-market-myth/
it’s the commercial vehicles tearing up roads.
Don’t they pay gas tax on that? Diesel fuel is colored to make sure it’s taxed. Home heating fuel is the same but clear. Don’t get pulled over with clear diesel in your tank!
That’s actually backwards – diesel without a road tax has dye added to it. And, the tax on diesel is cheaper than gasoline, a ‘subsidy’ for (mostly) the transportation industry. I’m paying more in tax per mile than most 18-wheelers while towing my racecar down the interstate, but guess who’s doing substantially more damage?
Ah, thanks for the correction. I had a 50/50 shot! You are on gasoline? I didn’t claim the price was fair—only that they were paying tax on it. And that’s where all the finagling comes. If they pay less it’s basically a subsidy to grease the skids of transport and keeping the economy moving. I’m not saying that’s fair. It just is what it is.
And now I see there are 4 colors of diesel: clear/yellow, red, blue and green. So the tax status with diesel has already been made fairly granular.
Heavy trucks do 95% of the weight related road damage but pay a fraction of the road related taxes.
Just and some red dye to it.
EVs are not getting nearly the subsidies that trucks get.
Illinois charges me an extra $100 for my EV. With this scheme I would pay maybe $250… which is fine.
Trust me that won’t stay as everyone starts driving an EV.
The grid upgrades will cost normal drivers trillions.
Could tax them by the watt-hour.
This is the way to go. More efficient/smaller EVs would be charged less (no pun intended) and rewarded for their lighter wear and tear on the infrastructure.
I know truck drivers complain about the diesel taxes they pay when they fill up, but they’re ignoring the fact that when fully loaded they cause as much wear on the roadway as something like 2,000 passenger cars, and they sure don’t pay 2,000 times the taxes that we do on gas.
The highways around here need frequent repaving because of the heavy heavy-vehicle traffic. The reality is cars basically subsidize the big rigs.
Still fine. We have to pay for the roads somehow.
My state has a surcharge for all “alternative energy” vehicles, which includes diesels and hybrids
$150/year for EVs under 6,000 lbs, $125 for plug-in hybrids under 6,000 lbs, $100 for non-plug-in hybrids, and $150 per year for all other non-gasoline vehicles under 6,000 lbs, which is diesel, ethanol, hydrogen, propane, etc. Regular gasoline ICE is $40 for the year
And each category does have a graduated fee table based on curb weight, so a GMC HUMMER EV is going to be more like $190 a year, since its over 6,000 but still under 10,000 lbs
So the little vehicles are subsidizing the big vehicles?
Double the weight should be 16x the tax if they are trying to be “fair”
Of course the states that are doing this are more about punishing people for not driving pickups and SUVs.
Road damage is not linear based on weight. All light duty vehicles are a rounding error in weight related road damage. 95% of that damage comes from heavy duty trucks greater than 26K pounds.
I mentioned the fourth power rule in several other comments. Ten times the axle weight, 10,000 times the road wear, but maybe five times the fuel tax.
Subsidized trucking killed the railroads. The trucking industry makes token “don’t throw me into the briar patch” complaints about fuel taxes, but using fuel taxes to pay for roads rather than than a direct usage tax is what made long distance trucking economically viable. Indirectly, highway fuel taxes killed passenger rail too.
True on both accounts. Which is why any attempt to get commercial truckers to pay more for roads gets a big pushback.
Not only from the large fleets but also especially from rural districts with a lot of owner / operators because driving a truck is one of the fuel economic opportunities in the area.
That Hi-and-I sure looks cute!
I’d buy that.
I see plenty of gaps on this approach. If I spend ~6 months out of every year with my EV in a different country, why would I pay a milage tax to the UK? Or visa versa, I’m Spanish with a Spanish reg, so I get to skip the tax?
What about PHEVs that can frequently cover 50% or more of their miles on electric, they could achieve an even lower rate than the 3p/mile rate, so now an EV is taxed more heavily than its kissing cousin.
Whatever they want to do, they need to apply it evenly across the market.
Most UK folks don’t drive to Spain – they fly.
And Spaniards rarely vacation in the UK.
It’s too cold and expensive.
I feel you’re missing the point. But if it helps, substitute France for Spain. I feel Cailas probably compares fairly to Rochester or Canterbury.
Meanwhile – Oregon, Utah, California, Virginia and Hawaii have some form of vehicle mileage taxes for passenger vehicles. Several other states have similar programs for heavy vehicles (Semis and Busses) – and many others have researched and/or participated in pilot programs.
There are GPS and non-GPS solutions which address your “fairness” issues.
Because I believe you’d agree that just because your vehicle or your neighbor’s vehicle doesn’t use dino-juice, that there needs to be some way to pay for the roads you both use.
No mileage fees in California yet.
I have a transponder in my car if I want to use premium lanes or toll roads to avoid driving through San Jose though.
Right – but that’s not a road tax – just a toll for the HOV lanes.
And you’re right – I read the map incorrectly.
CA is just one of the states which has participated in pilot programs (scroll down to the second chart)
https://taxfoundation.org/blog/state-vmt-vehicle-miles-traveled-taxes/
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Compared to the last time the UK government tried to roll out road pricing (which was going to be with GPS boxes installed in every car – including ICE vehicles) this is a pretty light touch scheme that doesn’t have the privacy issues inherent in live tracking every single vehicle on the road.
just figure out a budget for the roads and pay it through the general fund. use taxes are so stupid on something as critical to infrastructure as roads. what is a good argument for doing it this way other than “that’s the way it’s always been done!”
You pay to play. It’s fairer and more efficient. And I would imagine that general use contributes to it as well, although I don’t know for sure. With most taxes it is almost impossible to tax on use without a lot of work. I pay property taxes which funds schools, my farmers market, the kids sailing program, the craft beer festival, the New Year’s Day polar plunge at the beach. If I don’t participate in any of those I still have to pay and I only get the dog park, fire department, police, etc. I’m ok with that. With a fuel tax you literally pay for what you use. 11 mpg heavy ass car driven 40,000 miles a year? You pay more. Toyota Yaris driven 4,000 miles per year? You pay less. I don’t see the argument against it. Just add in a way to charge EVs.
The only thing that goes against using exclusively road taxes for funding roads is that they have a strategic value as well as an economic one.
The US has a specific problem in that fuel taxes have never been high enough to cover the cost of road construction and maintenance. I don’t want to say that’s a US problem rather than an “every other country in the developed world” problem, but in my view it’s quite similar to the discussion on healthcare in that respect.
We don’t have Canyoneros in Europe, and yet somehow we still live.
Yeah, the interstate highway system was originally the Dwight D. Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways and is designed to enable heavy military equipment to move around the country.
How about charging a base Civic 40% more per mile than a Civic hybrid? They both drove the same miles and take the same space on the road.
If you have a use tax it should be based on use – not something unrelated like fuel consumption. Gas taxes are just another “sin” tax like the high taxes on cigarettes and alcohol.
Fine, as long as you charge a f250 1,000 times as much. Fair is fair.
If we are talking about a use tax and evenly distributing fees based on weight both a Civic and F-250 will pay almost nothing.
Graph y=x^4 and you will find that all light duty vehicles are in that first 20% of the graph where the line is basically flat
Based on GVWR a F250 does about 40x more damage than a Civic. That compares to about 10,850 times more for a semi.
If road fees were only based on weight related damages they would be almost 100% covered by commercial vehicles. Of course 100% of road wear isn’t based on weight. Age, weather, salt use, natural events – all contribute.