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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

#311

Post by kilotaras »

kanox wrote: post #243
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…

> 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 who can't. For electric, it was worse - because they do tend to be more expensive to purchase up front, and they paid no fuel tax at all. Encouraging the adoption of cleaner but more expensive technology is always going to be regressive,…

I'm of mind that all government "monetary disincentives", e.g. fines, sin taxes, pollution taxes should go into fee and dividend scheme. Solves both moral hazard (we want more fines/driving because we need revenue) and regressive nature of those.

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

#312

Post by Gibbon1 »

kilotaras wrote: post #311
kanox wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 who can't. For electric, it was worse - because they do tend to be more expensive to purchase up front, and they paid no fuel tax at all. Encouraging the adoption of cleaner but more expensive technology is always going to be regressive,…

I'm of mind that all government "monetary disincentives", e.g. fines, sin taxes, pollution taxes should go into fee and dividend scheme. Solves both moral hazard (we want more fines/driving because we need revenue) and regressive nature of those.

I thought of that for a long time. Finally decided that fines should be handed over the Social Security Admin and booked against the offenders account.

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

#313

Post by handol »

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…

> Thus indeed if you have basically any heavy freight at all on a road, the rest is negligible.

Racetracks don't carry freight, but the surface does goes bad in a couple decades.

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

#314

Post by yarcob »

adrianN wrote: post #71
zozbot234 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is true, but some portion of road maintenance costs is independent from vehicle-caused wear-and-tear on the actual road surface. You would want this portion to be paid also by standard, non-commercial vehicles since these users are clearly receiving some value from the existence of a well-maintained road.

Everybody is receiving benefits from well maintained roads, just like everyone is receiving benefits from schools. Why special taxes for users unless you want to discourage use? Just pay for maintenance from the general budget.

Because everyone benefits more from roads that are less congested.

If everyone rode bikes or the bus 90% of the time, there would be mostly empty roads in the 10% of time that they do use a car.

If you had to pay a significant price per km in congested areas, you'd probably drive less, but it would be a nicer experience when you do drive.

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

#315

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

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.

Northern roads are often (but not always) designed with more substantial shoulders to mitigate frost heaving on the edges of the road bed and plow damage.

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

#316

Post by josephcsible »

refurb wrote: post #284
josephcsible wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My opinion: The transition from ICE vehicles to EVs is a very large net benefit to society, so during this period when new ICE vehicles are still legal, we should be giving EVs special ("unfair") benefits to encourage people to switch. If this new tax results in people choosing to buy an ICE vehicle who would have bought an EV without it, that's a very bad outcome. As for the loss of revenue from the gas tax, I think…

"we should be giving EVs special ("unfair") benefits to encourage people to switch" Sure, but at least in the US, electric vehicles already get numerous other benefits include tax rebates, lower registration fees, HOV lane access, etc.

> tax rebates

Not Tesla or GM.

> lower registration fees, HOV lane access

Not in most states.

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

#317

Post by justatdotin »

jashmatthews wrote: post #272
leetcrew wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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_...

https://www.nine.com.au/entertainment/viral/towing-boat-with...

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

#318

Post by coryrc »

peterwoerner wrote: post #266
Retric wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

No, the batteries "die" because cold weather requires more energy to start the car and batteries are far less effective when cold. (Physically they die either from grid corrosion increasing resistance so they can't provide enough current to start or the plates shedding active material to the point where they can't hold enough charge). There is normally not any copper in a standard car starter battery.

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

#319

Post by floatingatoll »

It’s bizarre that they didn’t just apply this as a universal tax of miles driven for all vehicles.

But the dollar amount sounds about right, so my objection is simply “charge the base miles tax to all vehicles and multiply it by the number of tyres on the car”, or set it by “axle weight ^ 4” as top comment notes, or whatever.

They can repurpose the gasoline tax as a carbon emissions tax, set to market rates for the carbon credit cost of a tank of gasoline, since we can generally estimate that within enough accuracy for a carbon tax.

Still, at least it’s progress towards rational behavior towards vehicles!

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

#320

Post by cs02rm0 »

recursive wrote: post #24
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…

I read somewhere that road damage caused by vehicles is not linear with weight. Heavy vehicles do much more damage. I can't cite a source, but I recall an exponent between 3 and 4 on the leading term. With that in mind, everything but heavy freight is basically negligible. And then it's generally for businesses where privacy isn't so much of an issue.

Road damage isn't the only issue with weight though.

There's safety, exhaust emissions, tyre and brake particles, noise, etc. I'm sure some of them don't have a linear relationship either.

One of the biggest upsides to taxing vehicle weight could be to counter purchasing decisions that have shifted to larger vehicles that no longer comfortably fit in parking spaces but ride better over ridiculous speed bumps and give drivers literally the opportunity to look down on others.

Taxing vehicle weight also doesn't have the privacy implications that taxing miles driven beyond fuel consumption does. It's always struck me as one of the more sensible aspects to tax.

Add lightness, as I believe Colin Chapman put it.

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