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| ▲ | triceratops a day ago | parent | next [-] | | > they still won’t be taxed for miles driven per year like gas vehicles are If you're referring to gasoline taxes, California taxes electricity too. > with far less road damage per mile I agree, let's tax all vehicles by weight. I'd love to see all those pickup trucks and full-size SUVs pay. | | |
| ▲ | altairprime a day ago | parent | next [-] | | Solar charged vehicles, such as with a Tesla powerwall, would pay zero dollars of tax per mile driven if you depended on an electricity tax. Doesn’t really work out in road repair costs to leave a massive tax loophole open. By weight and by tire count! Have to made sure to deal with four-tire axles and such, not to mention electric semi trucks. I believe the California pilot determined that odometer reporting and occasional DMV drive-thru checks will be the solution. I’d post the newsletter to HN the next time it comes out but this isn’t really the sort of group that appreciates taxation. | | |
| ▲ | triceratops 14 hours ago | parent [-] | | > Solar charged vehicles, such as with a Tesla powerwall Paying tens of thousands to avoid a few cents per gallon doesn't immediately strike me as a great deal. "According to Caltrans, Californians with gas-powered vehicles pay about $300 a year in state gas taxes."[1] This is a tiny minority of EV drivers. > Doesn’t really work out in road repair costs For that matter did the gasoline tax ever fully cover repair costs when EVs weren't around? I always had the impression that funds were needed from other sources too. It's interesting to see so many people get religion about "making drivers pay their fair share" after EVs became popular. > By weight and by tire count Even better! 1. https://abc7.com/post/california-looks-eliminate-gas-tax-rep... | | |
| ▲ | altairprime 9 hours ago | parent [-] | | I’m not specifically concerned about EVs as I am vehicle mass X tires on road — it’s just that EVs further piled on the problem, and so of course they’re a focus of attention now. doi.org/10.1007/s10098-022-02433-8 estimated 20-40% more road wear for EV vehicles of equivalent passenger capacity as gas vehicles, for example. If someone had started making gas SUVs out of osmium because it’s more crash resistant, I’d be just as annoyed at the loophole exploit of that as I am about that extra untaxed mass-wear on roadways being batteries. (But if you solve the battery mass problem, the flat fee is still unfair in favor of high mileage drivers versus low mileage ones, so a mileage-mass tax will always be the correct outcome.) However, the real threat to roadways that hasn’t yet been fully realized is EV autopilot tractor-trailers; without gas taxing, without mileage taxing, and without the constrain of having to pay humans to drive them, the state highways are going to get shredded into gravel in a decade. Both have to be treated; passenger vehicles wear down roadways in residential zones that semi trucks don’t enter, and semi trucks wear down highways vastly more rapidly than any personal vehicle of any weight can. I participated in two phases of the mileage pilot program described by that ABC article over the past ten years and look forward to its eventual implementation in literally any form whatsoever. I truly hope that their final form ends up being mass-wheel-mileage taxation with a transit credit for public transit and 10+ passenger vehicles, so that lightweight Priuses and buses pay little and heavyweight Rivians and semi trucks pay lots. Whatever their first steps towards that outcome is, I’ll take it, whether it’s gas tax or EV tax or truck tax corrections or any combination thereof. The status quo is unfair in multiple ways and they’ve got their work cut out for them. |
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| ▲ | jaredhallen a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | Pickups are taxed by weight. | | |
| ▲ | Braxton1980 a day ago | parent [-] | | I believe they mean the gasoline tax not the registration cost which isn't a huge increase between size |
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| ▲ | burnerthrow008 a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | EVs pay a registration surcharge in lieu of gas taxes. And it works out to something crazy like 20k equivalent miles per year. | | |
| ▲ | altairprime 19 hours ago | parent [-] | | Here in California, 20k miles of driving at 30mpg (so, highway only, which is of course unrealistically high) is $600 in gasoline taxes per year, with California state and local taxes at $0.612/gal; meanwhile, the EV registration gas tax makeup fee is $118/yr, which is equivalent to 192 gallons per year of tax, which at 30mpg is merely 6k miles, not 20k. California average miles driven is estimated at 11k. So: the EV loophole is costing the state half of the road maintenance tax budgeted for road wear in subsidies paid to EV drivers, assuming that all gas vehicles get 30mpg at all times. I don’t expect that gap to last much longer now the Federal government is openly hostile to the state. Hooray for silver linings, I guess. | | |
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