Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's quite tricky actually. There's other negative externalities from car usage apart from the energy usage, like tire and brake dust, congestion, accidents, and road wear. And using up limited space in cities for parking. Etc. etc. Even if you only wanted to tax energy usage, that clearly correlated with the amount of fuel or electricity used. Taxing liquid fuel is common and a sensible choice, however you can't sla…
You can slap a tax on the car. You simply take energy used/miles driven and that's your multiplier for a yearly vehicle tax. It could be collected by insurance companies (that usually require you to submit the miles driven anyway) on behalf of the government . As for the other things, such as congestion, I believe it when I see proof that there is a big difference between cars. Even if there is, the priority right no…
Which implies that a vehicle tax should then be primarily concerned with non energy use types of externalities. And maybe generally funding road construction, and so on. Probably a lot of that is more accurate if the tax is a function of distance driven than a fixed cost, true, assuming you can reliably get that information in a privacy compatible way.