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

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141–150 of 360 posts

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

#141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lol assuming inflation is caused by an increased money supply; not the material food shortage we are seeing. Further, this type of taxation is a regressive tax.

> assuming inflation is caused by an increased money supply; not the material food shortage we are seeing Doesn’t matter. Fiscal taxation (spending) reduces (increases) aggregate demand directly. No need for monetary transmission channels.

Taxation doesn't change the amount of spending. It only changes who is doing the spending.

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

#142
post #124
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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) That is the entire point. Why are we subsidizing other peoples' bad decisions? If you want to go shop for fast fashion every other day or drive a 9,036-pound electric Hummer the rest of us should not pay the price for your jackassery.

I think you’re underestimating how fourth powers work. If you want to charge a 10,000 pound hummer $1000/year to provide substantial disincentive then you end up charging a five axel semi trailer (75,000 pounds) $3,164,000/year. That obviously doesn’t work.

Why doesn't it work? Those vehicles would either need to add more axles[1], or you'd spread the same shipment over more lighter vehicles.

Such a tax should be as close to an approximation of the actual cost of road maintenance, full stop. If it makes certain vehicles uneconomical that's the intended effect.

Of course you'd want to grandfather in such a drastic policy change, or phase it in at some % per year.

1. Taxing this based on axle weight is also stupid. In reality road wear is a function of tire width/shape/size etc., speed and numerous other factors.

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

#143

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…

> I hate that it's being used as an argument against cyclists: "get off the road, you don't pay road tax".

It's really more that many cyclists are in the way and aren't going the speed limit. You end up holding up a lot of traffic that is forced to go slower and that's annoying to everyone. to be frank, when you're driving a car a person on a bike taking up the entire road is annoying. This is why people really dislike bikes - they get in the way of people trying to get somewhere.

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

#144

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…

> I hate that it's being used as an argument against cyclists: "get off the road, you don't pay road tax". It's really more that many cyclists are in the way and aren't going the speed limit. You end up holding up a lot of traffic that is forced to go slower and that's annoying to everyone. to be frank, when you're driving a car a person on a bike taking up the entire road is annoying. This is why people really disli…

hell hath no fury like a mildly inconvenienced motorist

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

#145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Off the top of my head, some results would be: 1. No one wants to lend to your country again because you paid them back with currency far less valuable than expected 2. Nobody wants to use your currency as a means of exchange in international transactions because it can fluctuate suddenly 3. Massive redistribution of wealth from savers and lenders to borrowers (maybe a good thing on the whole, but devastating for peo…

All of your post assumes that when government creates money, it causes inflation, and when private banks create money, it causes no inflation. No such distinction exists. Most money is created by private banks.

I know most money is created by private banks. But that is stable (it is assumed by ceteris paribus). If a government decided to stop taxing then that would be something new.

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

#146
post #81
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

bicycle and pedestrians could be exempted from a road tax based on fairly simple assumption: the wear and tear is minimal compared to a car. It wouldn't even surprise me if the wear and tear is so small that it can't even be measured. But I could be wrong. It would be interesting to hear if heavy bike/pedestrian roads have higher road maintenance than those that are used lightly. My guess would be that the major wear…

> bicycle and pedestrians could be exempted from a road tax based on fairly simple assumption: the wear and tear is minimal compared to a car. It wouldn't even surprise me if the wear and tear is so small that it can't even be measured. Isn't car wear and tear minimal to HGV wear and tear?

It also depends highly on your local weather, I imagine. I'm willing to bet that a harsh winter does more road damage than all traffic combined.

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

#147

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…

The “pollute more from the tires being heavier” is a myth, by the way. There was an article that circulated claiming this, but they never actually measured the tire pollution of electric cars, just extrapolated from ICE cars with really terrible and ultimately false arguments. Electric cars tend to use low rolling resistance tires (potentially less wear… if you’re experiencing less rolling resistance, that means less…

> Electric cars tend to use low rolling resistance tires (potentially less wear… if you’re experiencing less rolling resistance, that means less energy ends up being used to produce wear, so less wear occurs… in part due to geometric effects and partly due to composition of the tires). Electric cars are also fairly comparable in curb weight due to massive weight reductions elsewhere, plus improved traction control (and the more gentle regenerative braking) means less wheel slippage and wear.

Do we need to go this deep into our analysis? I would think ((pi*radius^2)-(pi*(radius-tread_depth)^2))*width/miles would tell us pretty much everything we need to know about tire emissions, and most EV owners in my experience will acknowledge spending much more on tires for the same # of miles or spending the same for a good bit less # of miles. I'm not sure what the dimensional differences are on your average EV tire purchase versus your average ICE tire purchase, but if we look at model 3 base tires vs civic touring tires (biggest stock civic tire sold):

M3: 235/45R18 10/32 (Primacy MXM4)

Civic: 235/40R18 9/32 (Eagle Sport A/S)

so at least as far as stock tires M3 should have more total tread than a similarly sized/similar TCO vehicle given the larger aspect ratio and deeper tread depth. Unfortunately I can't find any non-anecdotal data on how many miles they would each get.

Of course I agree with pretty much everything you said but I do think tires are an important conversation to have around EVs, particularly when prices come down and budget conscious buyers start putting cheap, loud, fast wearing tires on their EVs.

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

#148
post #118
post #78

For the road wear — tax the tires proportional to the tire weight. But that most likely would mean few-fold increase in the tire cost and may impair road safety. Easier to add an annual fee proportional to the square of fully loaded vehicle mass. Would be about £1k/yr on average. Less for smaller cars, more for larger ones.

If implemented properly and adjusted for mileage, this would have interesting impacts on both the cost of EVs as well as the cost of liquid fuels. EVs tend to be heavier, so they'd pay more on average. OTOH, fuel transport trucks are very heavy and fully taxing based on the square of fully loaded weight would increase transport costs significantly. This would end up getting passed on to ICE vehicle users. This soluti…

Big problem with taxing more heavy trucks is that price will get moved on customers, which will move it on end users. And because almost everything is transported by a truck into shops, which will cause hike in prices for goods in shops - you are now punishing poor.

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

#149

I think people are starting from the wrong end of the problem. It appears we have two types of roads, access roads (think last mile roads in residential or rural areas) whose replacement cycle is driven by useful life vs usage. Then we have high throughput roads, that have enough volume to require usage driven replacement cycles. So if those access roads are y% of the miles and x% of the cost, then a vehicle “access”…

The actual problem is that government is going to lose 35 billion per year in tax revenue, and they are trying to prevent that. What they actually spend that money on is secondary, they just need a good story to tell to their voters :)

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

#150

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…

> I hate that it's being used as an argument against cyclists: "get off the road, you don't pay road tax". It's really more that many cyclists are in the way and aren't going the speed limit. You end up holding up a lot of traffic that is forced to go slower and that's annoying to everyone. to be frank, when you're driving a car a person on a bike taking up the entire road is annoying. This is why people really disli…

> many cyclists [...] aren't going the speed limit.

It's a speed upper limit, not a minimum. Are you upset when an agricole machine is using the public roads?

This "annoyance" against people not travelling at the speed limit on public roads is based on a lack of time management and the expectation that the road is empty. This is a selfish point of view.

When I want to control my travelling time, I walk or cycle. When I want comfort, I use public transportation or my car.

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