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

291–300 of 388 posts

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

#291

Post by x87678r »

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…

Specifically Diesel in NZ is not taxed because most a huge amount used by Farmers for tractors and/or generators so RUCs were added to charge diesel trucks.

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

#292

Post by oh_sigh »

dschuler wrote: post #176
oh_sigh wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A 4 door luxury sedan would be a better comparison. For example, an Audi A4 has a 3700 lbs curb weight. Also, since road damage scales at something like axle weight ^ 4th, balance issues could completely override the 300 lbs difference in mass. For example, if the Tesla 3 can have 2 axles each with 2036 lbs/axle (because there is no ICE weighing down the front), it could theoretically be less damaging to roads than a…

ICE vehicles aren’t front-heavy like that, it would be terrible for braking performance.

The Audi A4 from my example is apparently 55/45 front/rear weight, but I wouldn't be surprised if some trucks like a F150 or something was closer to 63/37. Of course, people who drive those things end up having to put artificial loads into the rear to make up for the weight distribution during inclement weather.

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

#293

Post by sydneycatalyst »

throwaway0a5e wrote: post #283
sydneycatalyst wrote: post #217

I think that road users should pay to use the road. Fuel excise, or electricity surcharge tax or whatever, is a tiny fraction of the subsidy that road users get from regular tax payers. I'm a blind Aussie taxpayer. Consider my tax situation. If I take an Uber to my local pub, that's about A$10. Of that $10: $0.90 in Goods and Services Tax $1 to the taxi compensation scheme That's 19% tax - or $1.90/$10. In Australia,…

>I think that road users should pay to use the road. I think we should have pay to use parks. And schools. What's the point of having government funded infrastructure if not to make it equally available to all regardless of means?

I agree. If we were to make roads equally available to all regardless of means, I should be able to travel to 100% of Australia, not the small fraction served by PT and P2P.

What I object to is that the tax for blind road users is several orders of magnitude higher than driver-users. And that comes with the caveat you can access maybe 5% of areas in Australia by PT and P2P.

At least my kids can use schools without an orders-of-magnitude higher tax. They can only use parks accessible by PT and P2P (which - in Australia - is a very small fraction).

So I get we all should pay for shared resources. But its less fair to ask someone who isn't permitted to access these shared resources an orders-of-magnitude higher tax to access a tiny fraction of those resources.

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

#294

Post by seanmcdirmid »

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…

Taxing by weight will put EVs at a disadvantage given batteries are heavy compared to fully loaded fuel tanks.

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

#295

Post by abnry »

mullingitover wrote: post #279

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 expo…

> Thus, fees should scale exponentially with vehicle weight.

Work is force times distance. You have to factor in how much the vehicle is on the road, and the gas used is a decent proxy measure of that.

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

#296

Post by sydneycatalyst »

Tiktaalik wrote: post #287
throwaway0a5e wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I think that road users should pay to use the road. I think we should have pay to use parks. And schools. What's the point of having government funded infrastructure if not to make it equally available to all regardless of means?

To be able to use the road at all requires buying a car, which is expensive. No such barriers in park use. Let's be clear, roads are for wealthy people, not the poor. (Yes I know bicycles and buses use the road too, but if that's all we built roads for we wouldn't need so many!)

I agree!

Well, besides not being blind or otherwise barred from driving through no fault of your own... :-)

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

#298

Post by war1025 »

mullingitover wrote: post #279

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 expo…

I believe road wear is calculated as the 4th power of axle weight. Trucks have many axles to distribute the load, and are forced to stop at weigh stations to verify that they are within weight requirements.

As far as road tax, the current system works pretty fairly for ICE engines, in my opinion. The larger the vehicle, the more powerful the engine, and thus the lower the efficiency.

So semis are paying higher road tax than a little sub-compact car.

Also, the more you drive, the more fuel you use, which means the more road tax you end up paying.

With an electric car, the incentives are all out of whack. Roads don't wear less just because you have an electric motor turning your wheels.

There is a similar issue with home solar panel installs. Utilities factor maintenance costs in as a part of their kwh rates. If you have solar panels rewinding your meter back to basically zero, suddenly you are hurting the utility company in two ways: They are buying electricity from you at retail instead of wholesale, and you are no longer paying your line maintenance fees.

It's great to give incentives for new technology, but as they say, you can't scale losing money on every transaction into a profitable business.

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

#299

Post by sampsonitify »

_-___________-_ wrote: post #235
benhurmarcel wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's still surprisingly high.

Many of the cars you see on European streets would seem a bit... small... to many Australians.

And the roads in reverse. Australian roads are massive (and fast) compared to Europe.

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

#300

Post by Godel_unicode »

tertius wrote: post #273
kortilla wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Looks like about 10x car miles per truck mile. So it's a rounding error in terms of road damage, it's trucks by a landslide.

https://www.bts.gov/content/us-vehicle-miles

Post reply on HN