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Electric Cars – fuel duty and road tax: how to replace £35B annual revenue

carwow.co.uk

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Re: Electric Cars – fuel duty and road tax: how to replace £35B annual revenue

#11

Post by techterrier »

gpmcadam wrote: post #6
matsemann wrote: post #2

There is no "road tax" in the UK, is it? It's a fee for polluting, not using the road. I hate that it's being used as an argument against cyclists: "get off the road, you don't pay road tax". This of course also ignores that most adult cyclists also own a car.. Norway have the same issues now. Almost all new cars are electric. You don't pay purchase tax / vat when buying it. Pay less on toll roads. Cheaper to use. Et…

It's a combination. Revenues gathered via road tax have a provision for older/more polluting cars so you pay less the newer your vehicle, essentially. Some of the money is used to fund the maintenance of highways, though. Local roads are funded by council tax, so this probably dispells the anti-cycling argument because presumably the cyclists do pay council tax (unless they're on motorways which is another issue.)

motorways, not highways

Re: Electric Cars – fuel duty and road tax: how to replace £35B annual revenue

#12

Post by tigerlily »

> Smart home wallbox chargers could in theory tell the electricity grid it was a car being charged, but homeowners could just plug a three-pin extension lead into a normal socket to charge their car, circumventing any such communication between grid and charge.

To encourage folk to use their wall box, offer a discount rate in exchange for utility control of charging. That way load can be shifted off peak if needed.

Re: Electric Cars – fuel duty and road tax: how to replace £35B annual revenue

#13

Post by [deleted] »

techterrier wrote: post #8
chrisco255 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point of road taxes is to pay for maintenance and expansion. Roads break down over time if you do not maintain them.

this is paid out of local taxation. Which is why pedestrians, cylists, equestrians, tractors, cows and ducks are allowed to used the road. There is no such thing as road tax.

[deleted]

Re: Electric Cars – fuel duty and road tax: how to replace £35B annual revenue

#14

Post by gpmcadam »

techterrier wrote: post #11
gpmcadam wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a combination. Revenues gathered via road tax have a provision for older/more polluting cars so you pay less the newer your vehicle, essentially. Some of the money is used to fund the maintenance of highways, though. Local roads are funded by council tax, so this probably dispells the anti-cycling argument because presumably the cyclists do pay council tax (unless they're on motorways which is another issue.)

motorways, not highways

No, it's highways because not all highways (major roads and motorways) are motorways.

See: https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/highways-england

Re: Electric Cars – fuel duty and road tax: how to replace £35B annual revenue

#15

Post by tigerlily »

causi wrote: post #5

Tax vehicles based on actual wear to the road surface and add it to the annual tag renewal. Of course, that would stop us from conveniently ignoring the fact that the vast majority of road wear comes from semi-trucks and other heavy vehicles.

I hear road wear scales with the fourth power of vehicle mass.

Re: Electric Cars – fuel duty and road tax: how to replace £35B annual revenue

#16

Post by JumpCrisscross »

throwaway0a5e wrote: post #10

How about the government just finds a way to make do? It's kind of preposterous that we're staring an economic slowdown and high inflation in the face after decades of incomes flat-lining and the .gov is telling people to cough up more. I get that EV owners are statistically richer but you're not gonna change that by raising the TCO via taxes.

Get your broader point about strained household budgets. But taxation is deflationary. Raising taxes lowers inflation.

Re: Electric Cars – fuel duty and road tax: how to replace £35B annual revenue

#17

Post by throwaway0a5e »

causi wrote: post #5

Tax vehicles based on actual wear to the road surface and add it to the annual tag renewal. Of course, that would stop us from conveniently ignoring the fact that the vast majority of road wear comes from semi-trucks and other heavy vehicles.

That would just result in a trivial tax for personal vehicles and high taxes on heavy trucks (which would just get passed on resulting in more or less a consumption tax, which isn't necessarily bad but that's outside scope for here)

Additionally, despite a lot of people saying they want to use taxes to "handle externalities" or some other sort of "pay per usage" type manner like that what they actually want is to tax people who are on the fence between bus pass and used cheap car solidly into the bus pass camp and taxing for road wear would not accomplish that.

Additionally, when it comes to all forms of public infrastructure there's a common good argument to be made for a tax that's effectively very flat. The whole point of government funded things is that we all kick in a little and then all can use the resulting things as much or little as we want and that this low cost per use has societal benefits.

Edit:

For these kinds of activism driven discussions it's generally accepted that road wear is correlated to weight ^4

cyclist -> 100 ^4

(very) compact car -> 1000 ^4

electric hummer -> 5000 ^4

medium duty commercial truck -> 10000^4

Pick what you think is a reasonable bill for any one of those and then compute what the resulting bill for the others would be. Even if you want to do variable rate monkey business you're gonna have a hell of a time overcoming the whole "^4" bit.

Re: Electric Cars – fuel duty and road tax: how to replace £35B annual revenue

#18

Post by lettergram »

gpmcadam wrote: post #3

"Road tax" (a levy to cover the cost of maintaining the public highway) obviously needs to be extended to cover EVs at some point. I'm surprised it hasn't already. However, broadly speaking: tax the thing you want less of. There's various strategies being raised to cover this so-called "lost revenue", including the tracking of your home electricity usage via smart boxes to tax you on charging your own car (!!) and ch…

> There's various strategies being raised to cover this so-called "lost revenue", including the tracking of your home electricity usage via smart boxes to tax you on charging your own car (!!) and charging cars a per-mile-tax instead of on fuel.

At the end of the day any implementation of the methods discussed lead to absolute tyranny.

To track per-mile-tax you’re going to have either government gps tracking in real-time or cameras tracking your ever my movement. Alternatively, the government will track and then likely limit power consumption for your cars.

This is the exact opposite of any free market. Effectively, you’re giving total control to the government around what movement you can make and/or you’ll have zero anonymity by law.

Re: Electric Cars – fuel duty and road tax: how to replace £35B annual revenue

#19

Post by faichai »

Everyone always seems to jump from general schemes (road tax, fuel duty) to Orwellian tracking (GPS everywhere). Seems like a simple scheme of mileage tracking and net charge tracking would do. You then have an overall energy use / mile figure that you can use to price each mile so people who buy more efficient cars are rewarded, and then charge by total number of miles, so people who do fewer miles pay less.

Re: Electric Cars – fuel duty and road tax: how to replace £35B annual revenue

#20

Post by smackay »

The UK Government currently spends around £11 billion on roads, https://www.statista.com/statistics/298667/united-kingdom-uk... so the excess is a handy revenue stream which clearly it would lothed to give up.

That means the real opportunities with the switch to electrifying transportation, like moving freight traffic to rail will not be seized as that would entail even more spending. Instead we are stuck with the problem that every solution to climate change is along the same lines of "just like before but this time with electricity".

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