Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

US bill proposes new national EV tax, while some push to slash gas tax to zero

electrek.co

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 103 posts

Re: US bill proposes new national EV tax, while some push to slash gas tax to zero

#51

Post by [deleted] »

nayuki wrote: post #38
back7co wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This unfortunately is flawed logic if it's intended to tax EV's as it would target semi trucks and heavy duty trucks more than EV's. https://ctr.utk.edu/electric-vehicles-damage-roads/

It's not flawed logic though. If, say, a mile of highway costs $1 million and it needs some expensive repaving/reconstruction every 20 years, who should bear the cost? The current model is roughly that all of society shoulders the cost roughly equally per person, regardless of how much they use that road or how much they drive in general. But clearly, some people derive more benefit from the road than others. The guy…

[deleted]

Re: US bill proposes new national EV tax, while some push to slash gas tax to zero

#52

Post by seanmcdirmid »

quickthrowman wrote: post #48
onesociety2022 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of the states already have an EV tax. For instance, WA charges $225/yr for registering an EV. The issue is unlike gas tax, it’s not based on actual usage. And the flat fee they’re charging is way higher than the gas tax anyone driving a gas car with avg fuel consumption would pay for driving the national average of annual mileage.

The math doesn’t work out very well for Washington, and I’m leaving out federal gas tax in the math below. Washington has a gas tax of 55.6 cents per gallon. The tax on 405 gallons of gas in Washington is $225 Average mileage driven in US looks to be around 14,000 miles (plus or minus 500 miles), which means you’d need a car that averages 34.5 miles per gallon to pay less in gasoline tax than you’d pay in EV tax.

I drive around 5000 miles a year and still pay $225/year for my EV. However, Washington is moving to a mileage based system for EVs, hybrids, and high economy cars. They are just going to go by odometer readings, which is about the only way it will work in the USA.

Re: US bill proposes new national EV tax, while some push to slash gas tax to zero

#53

Post by seanmcdirmid »

mjevans wrote: post #21
jaredwiener wrote: post #13

Zeroing out the gas tax aside, the EV tax makes _some_ sense. Gas taxes provide the revenue that help pay for road maintenance and the rest of the infrastructure that cars use. Gas taxes made sense -- the more you drive, the more you chip in to keep the road system going. That infrastructure still needs to exist, and will still cost money to maintain -- but if fewer people are buying gas, then the funds will dry up,…

Offhand, the maintenance costs are something similar to a scalar that is the square of a vehicle's weight. Rather than indirectly taxing via fuel it would be more proper to do so by said maintenance scalar (weight based) and the distance driven as the inputs. Presumably paid at the time of registration renewal or at vehicle inspections. That sounds like a lot of infra change to setup, so there should be plenty of pla…

Done that way, personal vehicles are barely going to be a blip on maintenance, but keep in mind this also pays for new construction as well as other non-pavement traffic infrastructure.

Re: US bill proposes new national EV tax, while some push to slash gas tax to zero

#54

Post by seanmcdirmid »

stavros wrote: post #20
jaredwiener wrote: post #13

Zeroing out the gas tax aside, the EV tax makes _some_ sense. Gas taxes provide the revenue that help pay for road maintenance and the rest of the infrastructure that cars use. Gas taxes made sense -- the more you drive, the more you chip in to keep the road system going. That infrastructure still needs to exist, and will still cost money to maintain -- but if fewer people are buying gas, then the funds will dry up,…

Are EVs that widespread in the US already that you're at the stage where you need to move from incentivising EV purchases to normalising their taxation?

Yes, and they have been for a few years now. I don’t know of a state that doesn’t charge higher tab fees for EVs in 2026. Maybe Alaska?

Re: US bill proposes new national EV tax, while some push to slash gas tax to zero

#55

Post by seanmcdirmid »

philipkglass wrote: post #44
legitster wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gas has a nice linear relationship with road usage. (Farms can currently buy tax exempt gas and diesel explicitly for this reason). A lot of states have experimented with mileage-based tracking for EVs but there is no realistic way to do it that's not super fiddly or privacy invasive.

Couldn't states take an odometer reading at tag renewal time and charge based on distance traveled? It wouldn't perfectly capture usage of in-state roads, but it should be close enough on average, it reuses existing mechanisms, and it doesn't require any sort of location tracking.

Washington state has a pilot to do this, it will be mandatory in a few years.

Re: US bill proposes new national EV tax, while some push to slash gas tax to zero

#56

Post by tedd4u »

onesociety2022 wrote: post #23
jaredwiener wrote: post #13

Zeroing out the gas tax aside, the EV tax makes _some_ sense. Gas taxes provide the revenue that help pay for road maintenance and the rest of the infrastructure that cars use. Gas taxes made sense -- the more you drive, the more you chip in to keep the road system going. That infrastructure still needs to exist, and will still cost money to maintain -- but if fewer people are buying gas, then the funds will dry up,…

Most of the states already have an EV tax. For instance, WA charges $225/yr for registering an EV. The issue is unlike gas tax, it’s not based on actual usage. And the flat fee they’re charging is way higher than the gas tax anyone driving a gas car with avg fuel consumption would pay for driving the national average of annual mileage.

I pulled some numbers and I get $239 for the average car and average use based on [1], [2], [3]. Using the same numbers the Federal part would be an additional $79. Do you have different numbers for Washington state? Like, do people drive less than 10,952 / year or have more efficient gas vehicles?

[1] WA gas tax $0.554 (Federal gas tax is an additional $0.184. California is $0.7092.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_taxes_in_the_United_State...

[2] Average fuel efficiency 25.4 mpg. https://gocarlife.com/average-gas-mileage-for-a-car/

[3] 10,952 average passenger + light duty miles driven per year. https://truedrivingcost.com/articles/how-many-miles-american...

Re: US bill proposes new national EV tax, while some push to slash gas tax to zero

#57

Post by tedd4u »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #52
quickthrowman wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The math doesn’t work out very well for Washington, and I’m leaving out federal gas tax in the math below. Washington has a gas tax of 55.6 cents per gallon. The tax on 405 gallons of gas in Washington is $225 Average mileage driven in US looks to be around 14,000 miles (plus or minus 500 miles), which means you’d need a car that averages 34.5 miles per gallon to pay less in gasoline tax than you’d pay in EV tax.

I drive around 5000 miles a year and still pay $225/year for my EV. However, Washington is moving to a mileage based system for EVs, hybrids, and high economy cars. They are just going to go by odometer readings, which is about the only way it will work in the USA.

Do you know how they plan to get the odometer data? Thanks.

Re: US bill proposes new national EV tax, while some push to slash gas tax to zero

#58

Post by dlcarrier »

legitster wrote: post #22

I want to set aside the author's disdain and polemics for a second: - The federal gas tax is low and unchanged. States have their own gas taxes in addition that do go up and have done so a lot in the last several decades. - The current compromise is to collect it once at a federal level and split the proceeds with the states. This has problems, but it's better than having every state track individual mileage on publi…

    - Gas tax goes towards more than just fixing road damage
Earmarking never sticks around; someone always finds a loophole to spend funds on anything unrelated.

Re: US bill proposes new national EV tax, while some push to slash gas tax to zero

#59

Post by johnea »

legitster wrote: post #22

I want to set aside the author's disdain and polemics for a second: - The federal gas tax is low and unchanged. States have their own gas taxes in addition that do go up and have done so a lot in the last several decades. - The current compromise is to collect it once at a federal level and split the proceeds with the states. This has problems, but it's better than having every state track individual mileage on publi…

I don't want to set the author's disdain aside at all. It's 100% justified.

This is really just a tax on leaving the stone age.

Especially given that my nissan leaf weights a little more than 1/2 of what an escalade weighs. It's purely just another disincentive to electrify, brought to you by the burn baby burn lobby.

The US has become the seed state of global idiocracy.

Re: US bill proposes new national EV tax, while some push to slash gas tax to zero

#60

Post by tedd4u »

nayuki wrote: post #41
hamdingers wrote: post #5

$130/yr? No matter how heavy the vehicle or how many miles you drive? This is all so silly. Every other mode of publicly funded transportation infrastructure has direct user fees based on usage, why not roads? Some combination of highway tolls and a weight-based mileage fee. But that would be an impossible sell because Americans have the impression that roads spring from the ground for free, since they're paid for in…

I agree with your comment a lot. My ideal for road pricing is something like a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle_miles_traveled_tax multiplied by weight (maybe squared, due to the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_power_law of road damage). I do think that a lot of people think that public roads are "free" and cost nothing to build and maintain. It is really hard to make people think about where the labor, mat…

Really this shows that the operators of 18-wheelers should be paying a lot more. Looks like diesel tax is 20-30% higher, not proportional to the thousands of times more damage the 4th power law implies. (A half-full 18 wheeler is about 40,000 pounds so, let's say 10x the weight of a passenger car).
Post reply on HN