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Victoria follows South Australia and imposes electric car road tax

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

#271

Post by souprock »

ACow_Adonis wrote: post #136
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…

Aside from an attempt to generate some inelastic revenue during a pandemic, I'm seeing very little talk of the other probable policy goal/implication of this change: that is to say, disincentives against cars and private transport in general with a hope to substitute to public transport. Like comparisons of Apple to Intel debates, this one is missing the clear other player in the room. While it's arguable about how s…

It doesn't make sense from a virus perspective. Public transport is a thing of the past.

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

#272

Post by jashmatthews »

leetcrew wrote: post #216
oblio wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

horsepower is rarely the limiting factor for a sedan's towing capacity. a sedan's chassis is only designed to withstand accelerating and stopping its own weight (plus a margin for safety and internal cargo of a reasonable mass). you could probably get away with towing a jetski with a typical sedan, but anything much heavier than that risks bending the chassis. even if a car can tow something without deforming itself,…

Here in Australia and New Zealand we regularly tow boats with Aussie sedans like a Ford Falcon or Holden Commodore e.g. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ford_Falcon_XR8_Ute_...

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

#273

Post by tertius »

kortilla wrote: post #183
Someone wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100 kg bicycle (including rider), 0.00000625 units of damage. So, getting people out of their cars onto bicycles cuts road maintenance cost. Because of that, building bike lanes/paths can be cheaper than not building them. (And 50 tonne trucks are very rare on most city roads, I hope)

A fuel truck that refuels most gas stations in the US is something like 40 tonnes so it’s not rare at all. As long as the roads are built to sustain those trucks the cars are negligible. So until cars are the big wear item, moving people to bikes is pointless from a road wear perspective.

How many car miles per large truck mile is driven?

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

#274

Post by CogentHedgehog »

URSpider94 wrote: post #182
rconti wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yeah, once we get to 25% adoption (or something) we can talk about how badly EVs are hurting fuel tax revenue. in the meantime, jack up the fuel tax in a planned, regular way, and let the market decide :)

That might be rational, but it’s highly unpopular with the 99% of people who don’t drive electric cars. This is virtue signaling,

So you're saying the 1% of people driving electric cars should pay for the climate change caused by the 99% that are not?

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

#275

Post by ACow_Adonis »

souprock wrote: post #271
ACow_Adonis wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aside from an attempt to generate some inelastic revenue during a pandemic, I'm seeing very little talk of the other probable policy goal/implication of this change: that is to say, disincentives against cars and private transport in general with a hope to substitute to public transport. Like comparisons of Apple to Intel debates, this one is missing the clear other player in the room. While it's arguable about how s…

It doesn't make sense from a virus perspective. Public transport is a thing of the past.

Well, while i think that it's a valid point to raise the question of public transport in a pandemic, judging by the number of people on the tram I just caught to the market, I'd be inclined to say that public transport might quip "rumours of my death have been greatly exaggerated".

Regardless, the government, both state and federal, is investing major dollars over the next 10 years on infrastructure which assumes the opposite, and given the current infrastructure is already there, i think its a bit premature to talk of the future with such certainty.

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

#276

Post by jpollock »

Dumblydorr wrote: post #253
jpollock wrote: post #7

In many countries, fuel taxes don't go into general revenues, they are ring-fenced and allocated for road maintenance. Even if they aren't, a reduction in revenue must be offset. The fact that they aren't charged taxes for use of the roads was the incentive. This is removing it in recognition that electric vehicles are now enough of a percentage of the fleet to affect tax revenue. New Zealand does the same, with dies…

These are island nations without their own fuel production and good renewable potential. Wouldn't they see it's in their best interest to maximize batteries to minimize fuel imports?

New Zealand is an oil and gas exporter. They have their own gasoline refinery as well.

This doesn’t maximize batteries, it impoverishes transport budgets (public transit and reading) and is a tax rebate primarily available to the wealthy, like solar panels.

There are good reasons to electrify the the transport system, but the transport network will still need to be funded.

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

#277

Post by brokenmachine »

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…

>tax all drivers based on (vehicle weight x kms driven x some constant).

But what about my mates who own the trucking companies? Are you implying they should pay their fair share?

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

#278

Post by brogrammer2018 »

jdhn wrote: post #9

I don't understand the opposition to this. These vehicles continue to use roads but don't pay any taxes that would help maintain roads if they were gas or diesel cars. How is that fair?

I live in South Australia. Taxes here are already high for everything road related; we already pay taxes for roads as part of Vehicle Registration (excluding compulsory 3rd party insurance); pay council rates (goes to roads), income tax (goes to roads), capital gains tax, and have a 10% GST (which may be 15% soon) which all feeds into the roads. Other parts of the world are providing incentives to EVs; but not here.

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

#279

Post by mullingitover »

These moves always come out of some sense of unfairness about electric vehicles not paying gasoline tax. However, we want people to stop using gasoline, and it makes no sense to punish people for doing a net good thing for society by abandoning ICE vehicles. To truly make a fair system, the payments for road maintenance should be proportional to the damage done to the road by the vehicle. Thus, fees should scale exponentially with vehicle weight.

This of course would make road freight very expensive, and that's a good thing, because freight should be shipped on roads as little as possible. Freight should be shipped by rail until the last possible mile.

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

#280

Post by ACow_Adonis »

lopmotr wrote: post #204
ACow_Adonis wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aside from an attempt to generate some inelastic revenue during a pandemic, I'm seeing very little talk of the other probable policy goal/implication of this change: that is to say, disincentives against cars and private transport in general with a hope to substitute to public transport. Like comparisons of Apple to Intel debates, this one is missing the clear other player in the room. While it's arguable about how s…

Isn't the whole argument for public transport that it has lower CO2 emissions per passenger-mile than private cars? Electric cars in a country with a high proportion of electricity generated renewably (24% and rising) could be better than diesel busses.

Indeed, hence my point. It's all well and good to paint the situation as one of petrol vs electric, but if the issue is actually private vs public, and the later is generally more efficient, then applying a road-tax on both petrol and electric vehicles makes perfect sense.

And it's not like the remainder living out in rural victoria (where there is no PT infrastructure) are going to be picking up EVs en-mass, so it probably doesn't effect them in any fundamental way.

edit: oh wait, you mean to imply that EV vehicles don't have the CO2 impact of ICE vehicles, and thus there's not an incentive to switch to public transport? I'm guessing that's still wrong (in that our mass transport is still more efficient overall). But there's also other pollution issues aside from CO2, and the general efficiency in terms of distance travelled and efficient use of space and traffic issues that come from preferential PT use.

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