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

371–380 of 388 posts

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

#371

Post by sokoloff »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #240
recursive wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You can also sidestep the privacy issue there, because large electric vehicles are likely to need special chargers. (How many kW do you need to charge a 1MWh battery in a reasonable amount of time?) And then you can levy road tax on large trucks per kWh at the charging point in the traditional way without even having to track everywhere they go.

How much privacy concern is there to have your odometer reading recorded annually in places that already do safety inspections? I mean, I've driven an average of 3400 miles per year on my car. Violate my privacy as much as you like with that data.

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

#372

Post by sagarm »

megablast wrote: post #229
chrismorgan wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Except we need trucks. We don’t need private cars.

We need transportation networks for goods. Rail is at least one alternative.

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

#373

Post by sagarm »

tgb wrote: post #33
recursive wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A lot of road damage in some parts of the world is caused by nature itself, though. Even roads without any freight traffic get frost heaves.

Mountain highways I've traveled have substantially more damaged right lanes from all the semis.

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

#374

Post by sagarm »

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.

Gas taxes pay less than half of the costs of maintaining roads.

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

#375

Post by somesortofsystm »

lopmotr wrote: post #207
somesortofsystm wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dunno, I think this is a pretty draconian imposition by a state known for its decadence in a country that used to like to think it was a leader in building new infrastructure in tough conditions. With all the energy resources at Australians' disposal, it sure seems off-kilter to not be rewarding those who chose to go more efficient. Would that there were Australias own local industry capable of competing with Tesla…

They will be rewarded. It's half the tax of petrol vehicles and the fuels is also much cheaper on top of that.

The point is, Australia could move off fossil fuels quicker than most other countries, and has one of the biggest motivators for doing so - its environment.

However, the will of the people is not there. Or at least, the technology to disrupt Australia's coal and oil junkies, isn't there.

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

#376

Post by jashmatthews »

sampsonitify wrote: post #299
_-___________-_ wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is true of urban areas but not expressways. Motorway limits vary from 120 (Spain) to 140 (Poland) with Germany having sections of unlimited autobahn.

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

#377

Post by AnthonyMouse »

sokoloff wrote: post #371
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can also sidestep the privacy issue there, because large electric vehicles are likely to need special chargers. (How many kW do you need to charge a 1MWh battery in a reasonable amount of time?) And then you can levy road tax on large trucks per kWh at the charging point in the traditional way without even having to track everywhere they go.

How much privacy concern is there to have your odometer reading recorded annually in places that already do safety inspections? I mean, I've driven an average of 3400 miles per year on my car. Violate my privacy as much as you like with that data.

There have been proposals to track the location of trucks at all times, presumably so that a truck that drives all over the country is paying road fees in the states where it's actually driving instead of to whatever other state it's registered in (which would presumably be the one with the lowest fees). Levying the fees at the charging point replicates the existing (imperfect but pretty good) model with fuel tax because you at least have to charge somewhere that you're actually driving that day, without the privacy implications of tracking the vehicle at all times.

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

#378

Post by kortilla »

Godel_unicode wrote: post #300
tertius wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It’s a nice real world example of big O :)

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

#379

Post by singhrac »

canofbars wrote: post #169
bigbubba wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you distribute the money to places where people drive but don't live? Gas tax handles this to an extent, but milage tax wouldn't; not without border checkpoints or mass surveillance.

The government has stats on how busy easy road is. Just pool all of the money and distribute it based on those stats.

To give an example - in my hometown in a few places there are small wires on the road surface that measure the number of cars that drive over it. Private by default!

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

#380

Post by javagram »

mulmen wrote: post #215
sampo wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is not clear to me how a large family is a net tax benefit Some of the children from a large rural families will move to cities and make careers that pay lots of taxes. Cities almost always have lower birthrates than countryside.

Yes, we need children. That's not a question. The question is if a single couple needs to produce so many children they drive a vehicle so massive is earns tax breaks.

In this context, I assume a "large family" is 3 or 4 children (a 5 seat sedan cannot physically, legally fit 4 children and two parents, and due to the size of modern carseats it can be dicey or impossible to fit 3 of them in compact or midsize sedans even for a 3-child family).

Even just maintaining replacement rate fertility requires an average of 2.1 children TFR, which means some families would need to have 3 or 4 children to get there since other families will have only 2 or 1 child.

Post reply on HN