21–30 of 35 posts
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> they still won’t be taxed for miles driven per year like gas vehicles are If you're referring to gasoline taxes, California taxes electricity too. > with far less road damage per mile I agree, let's tax all vehicles by weight. I'd love to see all those pickup trucks and full-size SUVs pay.
Pickups are taxed by weight.
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That’s how it works now, for 5 bucks you just zoom down fastrak. Always blows my mind seeing 911s sitting in traffic instead of using it
Off topic, but prompted by your 911 comment. I had a couple of friends buy cars at the same time - one bought a new Subaru, and the other a used 997 Porsche 911. The 911 cost more, but not a large difference in price. In that part of the world, the Subaru (and almost all new cars) loses 40% in the first year in depreciation, and continues to drop off at 10% - 15% per year. The 911 has more expensive maintenance and i…
It just felt like a ham-fisted way to incentivize EV purchases, when there are better ways to do that.
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Well, no, they still won’t be taxed for miles driven per year like gas vehicles are. Not yet, anyways! Probably two or three years left on that watt-o-mobile owner loophole (that Priuses have been exploiting for years, but with far less road damage per mile traveled due to being hybrids). Or maybe less if the feds starve California of transportation funding in petulance at whatever.
EVs pay a registration surcharge in lieu of gas taxes. And it works out to something crazy like 20k equivalent miles per year.
So: the EV loophole is costing the state half of the road maintenance tax budgeted for road wear in subsidies paid to EV drivers, assuming that all gas vehicles get 30mpg at all times. I don’t expect that gap to last much longer now the Federal government is openly hostile to the state. Hooray for silver linings, I guess.
Good. I always found that weird. To me, the carpool lane is there to encourage drivers to put more people in their cars in order to reduce traffic. Allowing a single-rider EV to use the carpool lane doesn't do that. It just felt like a ham-fisted way to incentivize EV purchases, when there are better ways to do that.
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> they still won’t be taxed for miles driven per year like gas vehicles are If you're referring to gasoline taxes, California taxes electricity too. > with far less road damage per mile I agree, let's tax all vehicles by weight. I'd love to see all those pickup trucks and full-size SUVs pay.
Solar charged vehicles, such as with a Tesla powerwall, would pay zero dollars of tax per mile driven if you depended on an electricity tax. Doesn’t really work out in road repair costs to leave a massive tax loophole open. By weight and by tire count! Have to made sure to deal with four-tire axles and such, not to mention electric semi trucks. I believe the California pilot determined that odometer reporting and occ…
Paying tens of thousands to avoid a few cents per gallon doesn't immediately strike me as a great deal.
"According to Caltrans, Californians with gas-powered vehicles pay about $300 a year in state gas taxes."[1]
This is a tiny minority of EV drivers.
> Doesn’t really work out in road repair costs
For that matter did the gasoline tax ever fully cover repair costs when EVs weren't around? I always had the impression that funds were needed from other sources too. It's interesting to see so many people get religion about "making drivers pay their fair share" after EVs became popular.
> By weight and by tire count
Even better!
1. https://abc7.com/post/california-looks-eliminate-gas-tax-rep...
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Off topic, but prompted by your 911 comment. I had a couple of friends buy cars at the same time - one bought a new Subaru, and the other a used 997 Porsche 911. The 911 cost more, but not a large difference in price. In that part of the world, the Subaru (and almost all new cars) loses 40% in the first year in depreciation, and continues to drop off at 10% - 15% per year. The 911 has more expensive maintenance and i…
40% depreciation in the first year is a myth. Show me one year old vehicle you can buy for 40% off.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Off topic, but prompted by your 911 comment. I had a couple of friends buy cars at the same time - one bought a new Subaru, and the other a used 997 Porsche 911. The 911 cost more, but not a large difference in price. In that part of the world, the Subaru (and almost all new cars) loses 40% in the first year in depreciation, and continues to drop off at 10% - 15% per year. The 911 has more expensive maintenance and i…
40% depreciation in the first year is a myth. Show me one year old vehicle you can buy for 40% off.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
EVs pay a registration surcharge in lieu of gas taxes. And it works out to something crazy like 20k equivalent miles per year.
Here in California, 20k miles of driving at 30mpg (so, highway only, which is of course unrealistically high) is $600 in gasoline taxes per year, with California state and local taxes at $0.612/gal; meanwhile, the EV registration gas tax makeup fee is $118/yr, which is equivalent to 192 gallons per year of tax, which at 30mpg is merely 6k miles, not 20k. California average miles driven is estimated at 11k. So: the EV…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Solar charged vehicles, such as with a Tesla powerwall, would pay zero dollars of tax per mile driven if you depended on an electricity tax. Doesn’t really work out in road repair costs to leave a massive tax loophole open. By weight and by tire count! Have to made sure to deal with four-tire axles and such, not to mention electric semi trucks. I believe the California pilot determined that odometer reporting and occ…
> Solar charged vehicles, such as with a Tesla powerwall Paying tens of thousands to avoid a few cents per gallon doesn't immediately strike me as a great deal. "According to Caltrans, Californians with gas-powered vehicles pay about $300 a year in state gas taxes."[1] This is a tiny minority of EV drivers. > Doesn’t really work out in road repair costs For that matter did the gasoline tax ever fully cover repair cos…
However, the real threat to roadways that hasn’t yet been fully realized is EV autopilot tractor-trailers; without gas taxing, without mileage taxing, and without the constrain of having to pay humans to drive them, the state highways are going to get shredded into gravel in a decade.
Both have to be treated; passenger vehicles wear down roadways in residential zones that semi trucks don’t enter, and semi trucks wear down highways vastly more rapidly than any personal vehicle of any weight can.
I participated in two phases of the mileage pilot program described by that ABC article over the past ten years and look forward to its eventual implementation in literally any form whatsoever. I truly hope that their final form ends up being mass-wheel-mileage taxation with a transit credit for public transit and 10+ passenger vehicles, so that lightweight Priuses and buses pay little and heavyweight Rivians and semi trucks pay lots. Whatever their first steps towards that outcome is, I’ll take it, whether it’s gas tax or EV tax or truck tax corrections or any combination thereof. The status quo is unfair in multiple ways and they’ve got their work cut out for them.