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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

#201

Post by jacquesm »

faichai wrote: post #19

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.

That's mostly because the concept of tracking has been pushed over and over again politically, it just never made it. It has been on the agenda in NL since the mid 1980's.

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

#202

Post by robertlagrant »

Robotbeat wrote: post #165
xur17 wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm guessing the argument is that EV's cost more upfront (since they include a battery, etc), but have a lower cost of use. Since you get charged sales tax on the upfront cost, EV's get charged sales tax on a larger percentage of the overall "ownership cost" of the car.

Exactly. With gas cars, you pay for gasoline over time. With electric cars, you pay about 50/50 upfront on battery & over time on electricity. EV owners are being punished for paying for part of the “fuel” costs upfront. For whatever reason, capital costs for consumers are penalized with taxes more than incremental operating costs.

> For whatever reason, capital costs for consumers are penalized with taxes more than incremental operating costs.

How so? Is the gas tax lower than the purchase taxes?

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

#203

Post by robertlagrant »

throwaway0a5e wrote: post #60
analog31 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>>> 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. Indeed, here in the states, cyclists pay for the roads that we use. For instance most local roads in cities and counties are paid for with property taxes. Income taxes cover a fair amount of road construction. The county bike paths have a fe…

>My hunch is that if one were to look closely at the funding of roads, one would find that they represent a net subsidy for heavy trucking. Which is itself a net subsidy for all sorts of other economic activity. It's subsidies all the way down.

Indeed - if heavy trucking is subsidised then eventually the prices you're paying for something are lower.

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

#204

Post by robertlagrant »

vel0city wrote: post #185
tzs wrote: post #174

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. That is the case, which came as a surprise to me. For things like the road bed, where the force from the surface is going to be spread out more, I'd expect the car to do more damage b…

Sure, the contact patch is a good bit smaller on a bike than a car, but people don't usually weigh 5,000lbs. I'd much rather get run over by average person on a bicycle than get run over by a car.

That's because you aren't a smooth surface :) Because of your shape (and I admit I'm making an assumption here) you will experience pressure spikes due to the fact that different bits of you stick out. E.g. knees due to their shape will experience much higher pressure. A road won't do that.

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

#205

Post by phpisthebest »

warmwaffles wrote: post #172
phpisthebest wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aside from the safety factor, tires do have an expiration date, like with most things tires are rated for time and mileage. ie 5 years or 50,000 miles Now most people only replace them at the milage limit like their oil because they run out their miles faster but for some people (like me) I tend to replace things on time more often because I do not drive that much

> ie 5 years or 50,000 miles It also depends on the make and where you live. I stretched my Yokohama's out to ~80k miles with good tread still left when I replaced them. But I live in the southern part of the US, so we don't have to deal with snow and ice cycles that cause tires to wear faster.

Heat breaks down rubber as well having "good tread" is not the only failure point or wear indicator, a tire can be bad while having "good tread"

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

#206

Post by cptskippy »

Robotbeat wrote: post #103
IndrekR wrote: 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.

I think it’d be pretty bad to penalize electric cars based on weight squared unless fossil fuels are eliminated from transportation. Then I agree.

It's not really a penalty. Road repair costs are real and you should be paying your share proportional to your usage of the road and the amount of damage your vehicle causes.

When ICE are the only game in town, a fuel tax is a simple solution because larger more damaging vehicles are generally less fuel efficient. The downside is that anyone using fuel for non-ICEV usage is unfairly taxed.

Perhaps putting the tax on tires is the solution because tire wear tracks to usage and vehicle weight as well? You can still have a fuel tax to penalize ICE in addition.

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

#207

Post by zip1234 »

chrisco255 wrote: post #152
techterrier wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Dunno how it works in UK, but in US, there are local roads, state roads, and federal roads. There are also local, state, and federal gas taxes that vary by jurisdiction. The funds from these gas taxes are used to finance new highway and roadway construction and maintenance of existing roads. Sometimes, a special tax is levied at the local level for specific local roadway projects. But the big infrastructure projects…

> the big infrastructure projects are almost entirely paid for by gas taxes. About 50% is probably correct: http://www.financingtransportation.org/funding_financing/fun...

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

#208

Post by dahfizz »

enragedcacti wrote: post #158
dahfizz wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Electric cars are also fairly comparable in curb weight due to massive weight reductions elsewhere, Seriously, this meme needs to die. A Tesla model 3 is the same weight as a BMW 340, and the model 3 is hundreds of pounds lighter than an SUV like the BMW X3. Batteries are heavy, but so are gas engines & transmissions.

> A Tesla model 3 is the same weight as a BMW 340 Sure, but its also 500-1200lbs heavier than a Civic depending on the trims of each which has very similar utility to an M3 and is much closer in TCO to a model 3 than a 340 or an X3 is. We shouldn't be having our cake and eating it too by saying "electric cars are more expensive but the TCO so much lower than ICE that its worth it" and then make comparisons to ICE veh…

The point is that ICE cars and electric cars are comparable in weight. There are some ICE cars lighter than an electric car, and some ICE cars heavier than an electric car. Some of that is just due to the fact that electric cars are new, and haven't moved into the "ultra light sporty car" segment with the civic or Miata.

The point is you don't see a BMW go down the road and freak out about how heavy it is. But there is this meme in everyone's mind that EV's tire polution is much much worse than ICE because EVs are much much heavier. They aren't.

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

#209

Post by robertlagrant »

tomgp wrote: post #160
pydry wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no road tax, only vehicle excise duty which bicyclists dont pay. It goes straight into the treasury so it's not even really "used" per se it's just a way of exerting downward pressure on inflation (which is how it should be, IMHO).

thats a strangely abstract way of looking at it. i think of it as a way to capture some of the externalities of car use, the environmental, social and public health damage.

The obvious way to do that is via the fuel tax, where the more you pay the more you use.

The reality is probably that it's not that well coupled to any cause, and really it's just a way to farm money from the majority of the country, who need to use motor transport to live their lives. The advertised political reason will change depending on the concerns of the populace at the time.

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

#210

Post by zip1234 »

bagels wrote: post #193

This debate is so tedious. Why not just slightly increase property tax or income tax? Why does it have to be usage based? Most other government services are done this way, we all benefit from having roads.

There are significant negative externalities to driving.
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