Would never for one second consent to the government tracking the location of every car, and would vote against any candidate who suggested such a thing.
Electric Cars – fuel duty and road tax: how to replace £35B annual revenue
311–320 of 360 posts
Re: Electric Cars – fuel duty and road tax: how to replace £35B annual revenue
#312Earlier quoted context omitted.
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. Taxi…
I think the actual measurement is off. If a single truck did over $3 million in road damage per year we’d have far worse infrastructure problems than we do. Chances are if you tax road damage you’re charging the hummer $10/year and the truck $31,700 or so.
Let's leave the specific numbers aside and just assume that there's a huge gap, e.g. ~$10 to ~$30k. You still haven't explained why that "doesn't work".
Clearly it would make some truck operations uneconomical, but that's a feature. The assumption is that the cost is being paid today, but it's effectively a subsidy that society is paying for.
Even if someone's going to argue that trucking is so critical to society that the trucks can't pay their fair share of road maintenance this way of doing it still seems dumb.
If you're paying ~$30k/yr for road maintenance per truck I'm willing to bet that you could e.g. spend ~$10k/yr to retrofit the truck to be gentler on the road (e.g. just adding an extra axle), and then use the remaining money to more directly subsidize trucking.
Re: Electric Cars – fuel duty and road tax: how to replace £35B annual revenue
#313Earlier quoted context omitted.
The difference between roads and other things you mentioned is that current road infrastructure, especially in cities have huge costs for health, lifestyle, mental health. I don't want cars in cities and if I have to have them I want car owners to pay the full cost of making city life way worse hoping alternatives emerge.
You can make that argument about anything, though. You need roads to have a civilization, otherwise you have no way to transport the goods you consume, or get to the hospital quickly, etc. What you're arguing is that you don't like the current implementation. I don't like the current implementation of medicare / medicaid / social security. It definitely is suboptimal for people's (mental) health, including those in m…
Social programs I don't benefit from don't hurt me. They just cost me. Roads as currently implemented make my life way worse. That's the distinction people see.
Re: Electric Cars – fuel duty and road tax: how to replace £35B annual revenue
#314Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure, and the Civic Type-R has a 0.8 second faster 0-60 than an SR+ M3 while weighing 550 lbs less and beats the Model 3 Performance at Nurburgring by over a minute while weighing over 1000 lbs less. All while having a $10k-20k lower MSRP. the Type-R is only 15 seconds behind a model S plaid at nurburgring which is more than 50% heavier. But beyond that, if the only thing you ever try to compare is 0-60 performance t…
> All while having a $10k-20k lower MSRP Civic Type-R is a 40k car, just like the model 3 and it probably has high markups above the MSRP on average.
The cheapest model 3 on Tesla's website right now is $47k MSRP, the 2021 Type-R MSRP was $38k (there is no 2022) and the Performance Model 3 is $63k.
So my bad its $9k-$25k MSRP, not that the minutiae of pricing is that important for this comparison. It was just to note that Honda isn't winning on weight by spending a fortune on materials or manufacturing like if I had compared the Model 3 to some supercar.
Re: Electric Cars – fuel duty and road tax: how to replace £35B annual revenue
#315Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 (a…
I don't think torque, tire compound and driving habits can be ignored in a serious analysis. Also, cheap tires tend to have harder, longer lasting compounds.
I was including all three of those in the "per mile" piece of the equation since we are looking at products in aggregate. If EVs generally cause people to accelerate harder than if they bought an equivalent ICE then that would be reflected in the reduced tire life and if chosen tire compound decreases wear then that would be reflected as well.
That said tire compound could be more or less dense or have more or less of an effect on the environment per unit so that wouldn't be captured, and low torque EVs would most likely have less wear/mile so the categorization of just EV vs ICE might be too broad.
Re: Electric Cars – fuel duty and road tax: how to replace £35B annual revenue
#316Earlier quoted context omitted.
It should be noted that weight has been dropping YoY and is expected to drop further when M3 gets a structural battery pack. Those drop the weight not only because there's now no longer a structure the battery is bolted to, it is the structure, but also because the weight drop lowers the batteries needed to get comparable range (further reducing weight). Model Y is the first tesla vehicle with a structural pack. I ex…
Unfortunately most of the benefits of structural battery packs haven't materialized yet based on the stats Tesla submitted to the EPA. The Austin Model Y is 25 lbs lighter but has 14kWh less capacity and 51 fewer miles of range. Part of this is probably the battery chemistry being used in the current 4680 cells and as the chemistry improves they may catch back up in range to the non-structural 2170 packs but they hav…
They’re going with cheaper (but safer and longer lasting) 100% Cobalt and Nickel-free LFP cells, right? That could explain it.
Re: Electric Cars – fuel duty and road tax: how to replace £35B annual revenue
#317Tax the oil companies for the difference.
Re: Electric Cars – fuel duty and road tax: how to replace £35B annual revenue
#318Earlier quoted context omitted.
The point is that it's not worth doing even for cars. If the toll for the truck was $50, the proportional toll for the car would be one half of one cent.
On the other hand, trucks are often speed-restricted and the tax might need to be on the order of $50k for a 60-foot truck (which would still equate to around $50 for a car). The costs would be passed down to all of the things that trucks are used for, so I suppose the average person wouldn't really pay any less for combined transport+groceries+fuel+household goods, but it might incentivize the use of smaller trucks…
I'd rather pay costs where they're owed personally
Re: Electric Cars – fuel duty and road tax: how to replace £35B annual revenue
#319Earlier quoted context omitted.
so perhaps its also time for the government to admit that the prior taxes didnt have ANYTHING to do with environment, but just a way to justify money grabbing to spend on their own worthy causes?
No, it's the opposite. You don't want people to drive because of the environment, health, noise, road "accidents" killing people, how it destroys cities etc. So the taxes are a direct incentive to find alternative modes of travel.
step 1: ICE cars are bad for the environment! we must add taxes
step 2: ICE cars are bad, electric cars good. We remove taxes for electric cars
... too many people get electric cars ...
step 3: its time to start taxing electric cars... reasons!
translation: governments likes to take money from its citizens that it can spend on whatever it deems worthy, and will happily come up with a reason, sometimes justified, sometimes not.
Re: Electric Cars – fuel duty and road tax: how to replace £35B annual revenue
#320Everyone 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.
Another easy way is to tax wear items accordingly and have inspections maintaining their condition for safety. E.g. EVs are heavier and wear down tires more than lighter cars. The state could implement a tax on tires and mandatory inspections for tread depth like they do with smog checks for emissions in gas cars. They could use the same testing infrastructure and just stock every location with a penny to measure tre…
Tire tread is kind of a dangerous measure; you don’t necessarily want everyone switching to a super hard tire. Basically you can trade tread wear for stopping distance.