A friend and I were talking about the weight of EVs and we assumed my EV would be heavier than his car, a BMW 3. The BMW was heavier. Maybe the average EV is heaver than the average ICE, but if you compare what the EV has replaced for that owner, it might be that the EVs aren't noticeably heavier. I just checked the car I had before the Leaf - a Subaru Outback. It was also heavier.

I don't think that taxing vehicles based on weight is the right option though. If the pollution is from tires, then tax tires. Do this based on the compounds present in that tire. If someone drives rashly, doing donuts all over the place, then they as a greater polluter will need to pay more. I don't really know anything about Formula 1, but get them to do the race on a single set of tires. Not for pollution, but for solutions that might make it into regular tires.

Denmark used to tax cars based on weight as it was considered that weight was equal to wear and tear on the roads. Although that logic should probably have been weight * distance driven.

Now there’s a fun tax to implement!

https://da.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/V%C3%A6gtafgift (Sorry in danish only)

The Tesla Model 3 Long Range weighs 1823 kg.

The BMW M340i xDrive weighs about 1818 kg.

Seeing as these two cars are similar in size, capacity, and performance (0-60 mph in 4.2 s), it is nice to see that the electric option weighs about the same as an ICE car of similar specs.

The Leaf, of course, is a very budget car that can hardly be compared to the BMW 3 series.

While EVs are just as bad as ICE cars on the tyre microplastics front, they are at least slightly better in terms of brake dust thanks to regenerative braking.

Those are two fairly substantially different cars though. A Fiat 500e is ~30% heavier than a Fiat 500.

I don't think you're wrong that we assume every EV to weigh as much as a Cybertruck, but there is a weight cost to EV power storage.

> If the pollution is from tires, then tax tires.

Why not but …

> Do this based on the compounds present in that tire.

I’m not certain we’d want to create incentive for less polluting compounds over security.

Also, tires are generally expensive and people are already driving with worn out tires regularly for this reason.

So why not, in absolute, I agree, but it may create issues.

> If the pollution is from tires, then tax tires.

I don't think you can tax tires high enough that it will make a difference, but the same is also true if we attempt to tax by weight. Any tax is going to be the equivalent of slapping €10 on a plane ticket. It's not enough to stop the behaviour, but might be enough to keep some people driving on dangerously worn down tires.

It also doesn't matter if the car is an EV or ICE, the behaviour we want to limit is driving. The idea of taxing the tires could of cause lead to development of tires that doesn't shed microplastic.

> before the Leaf - a Subaru Outback. It was also heavier.

A bigger car with more cargo capacity was heavier? Is that a surprise? How _much_ heavier was the Outback? Only 100 lbs or so? That's the surprise.

Not really relevant to your overall point, but I found it interesting that apparently F1 already tried that:

In 2005, tyre changes were disallowed in Formula One, therefore the compounds were harder as the tyres had to last the full race distance of around 300 km (200 miles). Tyre changes were re-instated in 2006, following the dramatic and highly political 2005 United States Grand Prix, which saw Michelin tyres fail on two separate cars at the same turn, resulting in all Michelin runners pulling out of the Grand Prix, leaving just the three teams using Bridgestone tyres to race.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formula_One_tyres#History

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2005_United_States_Grand_Prix

Usually you calculate with 20% more weight from EV. Significant, but not as much as the general trend to build housewife tanks.

Your first sentence implies there is some relevance of taking an arbitrary EV and comparing it to an arbitrary ICE. There's not... I am gonna bet anything your random EV is gonna be heavier than a Suzuki Swift.

No-one actually wants to do this but the answer is to tax fuel. UK road tax for example already taxes bigger/heavier cars more (albeit not particularly granularly), so there’s your weight component. Fuel consumption is a decent proxy for distance.

Obviously there’s some maths needed on how to apply the tax to both ICE and EVs, and to think about edge cases (super efficient but hard on tyres), although my gut says that likely the harder you are on tyres, the harder you’ll be on fuel.

It seems a number of factors contribute to this beyond weight: how you drive (braking and accelerating aggressively), what conditions you drive in, the state of your tires, etc.

Weight seems to be one easy to understand and affecting factor. Why not start there?

Ideally, sure. But it will result in people stretching their tires more and more, and thus more accidents.

We already tax 'distance' by putting tax on the petrol.

Damage to the roads increases with the fourth power of axle weight. It follows that all passenger cars heavy or not, EV or ICE are insignificant for road-damage.

One could surmise that there is a similar relation with tire wear and therefore pollution from them as well.

But taxing tires is I think a good idea as it is a consumable and the wear and it's impact can be directly measured.

The problem I see with taxing tires is twofold:

- how is taxing going to solve this problem, it's unlikely that it is going to have a significant impact on driving

- can taxes be fed into tire research in a way that reduces the impact on the environment? Are there any solutions that need funding?

Doing a Formula 1 tace on a single set of tires would change the strategy in auto racing. I strongly disapprove.