Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Victoria follows South Australia and imposes electric car road tax

thedriven.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

261–270 of 388 posts

Re: Victoria follows South Australia and imposes electric car road tax

#261

Post by notatoad »

AlotOfReading wrote: post #218
lmilcin wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you misunderstand what the road tax (or any other tax) is for. There are three main reasons for a tax to exist: 1. To bring revenue 2. To create incentive 3. Social justice (or illusion of it) Revenue from a specific tax is almost never used for a specific purpose. All revenue goes into a large bin from which the government takes to finance everything. Revenue from fuel/road tax is not used to finance buildin…

I'm not sure how it works in your country, but in the US fuel taxes don't go to the general pot, they end up in a specific fund called the Highway Trust Fund that's specifically earmarked for transportation infrastructure and maintenance.

This is true, but the highway trust fund is not funded exclusively by fuel taxes, it's funded from the general fund

https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/briefing-book/what-highway-t...

Re: Victoria follows South Australia and imposes electric car road tax

#262

Post by Baeocystin »

jholman wrote: post #255
Baeocystin wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Before any new car hits the showroom, the EPA runs an emissions evaluation and calculates a “CO2 equivalent” – a single number that represents GHGs CO2, NO X , HC, and CO. The CO2 equivalent units are in grams/mile, so a higher number means more GHGs and more climate damage. For a 2WD 2020 Ram 1500 HFE on the highway, that number is 340 g/mile. Unfortunately, motorcycle emissions data isn’t documented by the EPA. Th…

Ah, hmn, that is a very good point. Per my previous comment, motorcycles are more efficient that cars, in terms of consumption of fuel. (though not as much as I'd have thought) But they're also worse on emissions , which is the public harm that is of greater interest here. And yikes, those numbers.

It's pretty shocking, isn't it.

//

The good news is that as batteries improve, bike like the all-electric Zero line are going to get both more popular and more affordable. I'm looking forward to when I can get one!

Re: Victoria follows South Australia and imposes electric car road tax

#263

Post by b212 »

chrismorgan wrote: post #133
adrianN wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wikipedia says damage is proportional to axle weight to the 4th power: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle_weight#cite_ref-13

I remember my dad telling me that when I was in my late teens. That it’s the fourth power startled me. To give an idea of what this means: For a 50 tonne semi-trailer with five axles, (⁵⁰⁄₅)⁴ = 10,000 units of damage. 2 tonne vehicle with two axles, 1 unit of damage. That one truck, only 25 times as heavy as a pretty heavy car, is doing 10,000 times as much damage to the road. Thus indeed if you have basically any he…

Wow, I always knew the semis are ruining roads but this 10k factor just blew me away, crazy! Thanks for a great post.

Re: Victoria follows South Australia and imposes electric car road tax

#264

Post by JTbane »

horsawlarway wrote: post #6

I'm not really sure there's a good answer here. Fuel tax is 43 cents a litre. Australian cars right now avg about 13.1 litres per 100km. So you're looking at ~$5.6 per 100km for fuel tax. This tax is adding $2.5 tax per 100km for electric. Right now, EVs are absolutely creating an regressive tax situation with regards to fuel. Those who can afford to buy newer, efficient cars can usually save money on tax over those…

Or just increase the gas and diesel taxes, which has a win-win of encouraging EV adoption and cutting down on CO2 emissions.

Re: Victoria follows South Australia and imposes electric car road tax

#265

Post by ungamedplayer »

AmericanChopper wrote: post #257
IronRanger wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The solution is to tax vehicles by weight, and time and location of use. Melbourne, the State Capital of Victoria, has a big problem with congestion at peak hours. If road use charging like in Singapore or London was introduced, it would shift usage to non-peak hours, and raise sufficient revenue to offset fuel excise. But that's politically difficult - whereas applying a tax to EVs, which currently very few people u…

Singapore isn’t comparable to this situation at all. To simply purchase a car in Singapore you need to purchase something called a certificate of entitlement, which entitles you to own a car for 10 years. They’re sold by tender, with different tenders for different types of cars. But you’re looking at about $30k USD just to buy the right to then buy a car. Singapore is also a country where essentially the entire coun…

That.. and a person can walk across it in a day. You cant walk across brisbane or many of the capitals in Australia in a day.

Re: Victoria follows South Australia and imposes electric car road tax

#266

Post by peterwoerner »

Retric wrote: post #211
myself248 wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If that were the case, then roads would be almost equally bad everywhere regardless of the weather. As a Michigander, the dictionary does not contain words to express how strongly I disagree with that implication.

Weather alone does very little. Weather + road ware makes things dramatically worse much faster. You can see this effect with private driveways in the north vs public roads in the south assuming similar construction.

As someone who migrated to upstate new york from Florida, I disagree. People here are constantly repaving, repairing, and resurfacing their driveways and sidewalks. While you need an initialization crack, that can come from a host of issues other than heavy vehicles including thermal cycling and initial defects. I will note that the asphalt and concrete construction may be different in the south vs. the north, but there is much much more driveway repair up here than there was in Florida.

As a pedantic side note, this is why your batteries die, the copper leads begins to fatigue and fracture due to stresses from thermal cycling.

Re: Victoria follows South Australia and imposes electric car road tax

#267

Post by ip26 »

mikeklaas wrote: post #119
ip26 wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the simplest arguments against it to me is basically to look at the landscape. For example, in the US, ballpark 1% of cars are electric. Meanwhile, the flat federal fuel tax is not indexed to inflation & hasn't been increased in almost thirty years. Yet everyone is in this panic about how EVs are going to cause a huge revenue shortfall!? I'm not opposed to EVs paying their share, but something is rotten in Den…

Good thought, but that might incentivize not replacing worn tires

Yeah, thinking more you are right. The tax would be quite substantial too, and probably drive a large black market.

Re: Victoria follows South Australia and imposes electric car road tax

#268

Post by ungamedplayer »

oblio wrote: post #200
ElKrist wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've lived both in France and Australia. Australians love 4 wheels drive and bigger cars. In some cases it's justified for obvious reasons: rough environments with less infrastructure (bush, outback..). In other cases it is for softer reasons: a big camping culture, having a big car being a social status, towing your boat/jet ski etc. Also a few other points to consider: _ Australia enjoyed economic growth for a long…

> towing your boat/jet ski etc. A 180-200 BHP sedan can tow a trailer quite easily. You don't need a big SUV for that.

Spotted the "Victoria on the move" plates struggling to accelerate uphill in Queensland on a single lane road delaying the locals trip by an hour to get milk.

Re: Victoria follows South Australia and imposes electric car road tax

#269

Post by jondumbau »

Baeocystin wrote: post #252
jholman wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmn. Brief research seems to show that you're more correct than I would have expected, but also that it's less true than I think you imply. For example, https://afdc.energy.gov/data/10310 gives motorcycles as almost 2x as efficient as cars, almost 3x as efficient as "light truck / van". Given that enormous amount of metal that's not being hauled around, I would have expected a bigger difference. Nonetheless, for sing…

>Before any new car hits the showroom, the EPA runs an emissions evaluation and calculates a “CO2 equivalent” – a single number that represents GHGs CO2, NO X , HC, and CO. The CO2 equivalent units are in grams/mile, so a higher number means more GHGs and more climate damage. For a 2WD 2020 Ram 1500 HFE on the highway, that number is 340 g/mile. Unfortunately, motorcycle emissions data isn’t documented by the EPA. Th…

Many motorcycles didn't come with cats in the 2000s, combined with lots of high strung 600s running massive valve overlap.

But the modern class of commuter bike has got to be pretty good. Drag coefficient is poor but they're also a much smaller area, and city driving is more forgiving for aero.

Re: Victoria follows South Australia and imposes electric car road tax

#270

Post by peterwoerner »

URSpider94 wrote: post #180
perlgeek wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you pay for maintenance from the general budget, you are allowing shipping companies (for example) to externalize cost that they incur on society. This is generally a bad thing, but very concretely it led to road traffic growing much faster than rail traffic (or canal ship traffic) even in countries with a very dense rail network.

This, and it also subsidizes people’s decisions to live far away from where they work and commute by car every day. There was a time when I think that would have been seen as a public good, and thus people were ok with that. Now is not that time. Comparing this with free public education, by not charging user fees to attend school, we are subsidizing (a) having children, and (b) educating them at the expense of the c…

Most public schools I have been a part of charge "optional" fees. There seems to be constant fund-raising for both extracurricular activities and general school funds as well as requests from students for classroom supplies. The bulk of the funding comes from the school taxes.
Post reply on HN