Fuel taxes pay for roads.

If only other types of taxes could be used to pay for roads... But alas, only gas taxes can be used for that. Entirely different monetary system, that. Roads need gas money and regular money just won't do.

I own an EV and already pay an extra road tax for having an EV to my state, on top of more for tires, more for insurance, more for repairs, and more for public fast charging thanks to the government’s failure to build up charging infrastructure at a decent pace. Why should I pay another tax to the federal government?

Are there no vehicle taxes in the US?

Duh, the issue here is it's a flat rate. It should just be calculated by mileage driven.

End gasoline and oil subsidies by taxpayers and put them into the road budget.

Fuel tax only pays 25% of the cost of roads.

EVs already pay electricity tax when they charge. We don’t need to double tax EV ownership.

One thing not included in either your calculations or the other person's, is we also subsidized the oil industry. So even if you don't drive at all your still paying tax for money that ends up being for oil companies and roads.

The person you're responding to was only talking about the tax, I think. 12k miles @ 40 mpg is 300 gallons, or let's say $1300/year at today's prices. The gas tax is flat rate per gallon and works out to a little under $240 for that 300 gallons, for the federal gas tax, anyway. On top of that, in the US, depending on the state & local jurisdiction, you will have some combination of state gas tax, excise tax for registering in a specific municipality/county/other, a registration fee (not always every year), and a yearly inspection fee.

In Massachusetts where I live, for a typical personal passenger vehicle, the state gas tax is an additional 27.47 cents per gallon, there's a biennial $60 registration, and a $35 yearly inspection. In my town, specifically, I pay about $75/year excise tax. My vehicle isn't the most efficient, so I'm in the neighborhood of $2500 in fuel costs annualizing current prices - of that about $700 is state gas tax and $465 federal.

I'm really trying to figure out how that makes it OK to tax an EV for double per mile as compared to a prius. The only point I see you making is that roads are fucking expensive to maintain and they drain taxes from everywhere.

Correct, but people do get value from a public road system existing. For example, I "use" roads when stuff gets delivered to me, or when a fire truck shows up to put out a fire at my neighbor's house. My point is that when we do tax people for driving we're carefully metering it for one group of people and charging another group a flat all-you-can-drive amount, which unfairly taxes people who don't drive very much.

Most states already have yearly vehicle inspections. It wouldn't be hard to include mileage metering in that. It wouldn't surprise me if it already does. I have to get my car inspected before I pay my vehicle tax anyways, so it isn't a complicated addition.

Those tires are much larger so you could just tax them more. Plus a pneumatic tire can only hold so much weight which is why they are 18 of them on a huge truck. Not to mention more load causes more wear on the tire so they go through them quicker. I mean it’s not perfect, lots of things affect tire wear like road surface, road smoothness, alignment, etc. Maybe you keep the diesel fuel taxes and just tax tires on passenger cars. Maybe give a tax break to small diesel cars to offset the double tax. Just brainstorming…

Generally the wear on tires is proportional to the wear on roads, since both are effectively grinding against each other with grit as the grinding medium in between. It would be harder to find a more accurate way to measure an individual vehicle’s contribution to road wear, given that weight is such a large factor.

If you used mass surveillance to record exactly how many miles everyone drove and record exactly which vehicle model they were driving for each mile (to know the vehicle weight), you’d still miss out on the cargo factor. For transport trucks that’s the biggest factor, since an empty trailer weighs far less than a full one (and different types of goods have radically different densities).

Of course we already know how much transport trucks weigh and how many miles they drive, since transport trucks are required to go through weigh stations and drivers have to keep detailed logs of how many miles they drive (and hours they drive consecutively). The issue then comes down to consumers and other business vehicles (pickup trucks etc).

You're not wrong, but this would still happen if you're were free. People just can't be arsed to do anything.

Probably a much lower rate, but still.

And also what happens if your tire is damaged and needs to be replaced?

Rich people with summer homes in another state are likely not a major percentage of drivers, I'm guessing.

In the USA? Hardly at all and in all states. I was under the same (false) impression before.

Take your EV in for its smug check

With the current fuel prices, every EV will pass its smug check :-D

Tolls only handle the mileage part if they were on every street, right? I'd say that is unfeasable, but as you mention they could just figure it all out with those flock cameras ;(((((((

The gullible part is thinking the federal government fixes the roads with your money at all. More than likely it'll go to Israel.

I bet the pick ups will pay less than an EV driver and are one of the main causes of road damages

Electric cars pay electricity tax. Gas cars pay gasoline tax. We don’t need to tax electric cars even more.

Didn't expect to see one of you types in the fediverse.

No, you're wrong. Human induced climate change and its dangers are all very real. Sure, the news reporting is sensationalist, but the facts are all there for you to check out, science going back almost a century.

Dudes out here telling us not to worry about climate change contradicting the entire scientific community, and the mountain of evidence to the contrary.

Great job douche bag, you should apply to become a fossil fuel CEO, you'd fit right in.

I would be happy to pay for that purpose, but it's way more tax than I would pay in fuel for the number of miles I drive.

Plus they've been waiving gas tax to make themselves look better on gas prices. So, right now, I'm subsidizing gas drivers.

Fuck the petroloids they can and should pay for my roads

Cars and drivers are registered on the state level, yes. There's an agreement that licenses from every state are valid in every other state, and infractions in any state are prosecuted by the jurisdiction in which it happens. There is no national registry, no. States can (and do) collect taxes and registration fees from drivers who reside in that state, but they don't typically collect on behalf of the federal government.

There's a reason cops ask for license and registration.

The US is a fake country. States have a massive amount of power, they control vehicle registration, sales tax, school programs... the federal government might as well not exist. The same applies to other so-called countries like Germany.

No. The registries are all state-level, though many states do allow other states to query their systems.

It's the same way they raised the drinking age to 21 despite there being no national drinking age laws nor a theoretically legal/constitutional method for enacting one. The latter was, obviously, successful.

That's an interesting thought.

thinks

Tax revenue would be less-frequent, and there might be potential to create a misincentive to encourage people to unsafely drive on threadbare tires longer than they otherwise would. But I could see that being done.

People already wait way too long to replace tires due to their cost. We didn't need to increase that hazard.

Personally more of a fan of a pay per mile system but this is actually a really cool sounding alternative.

It is always far easier to accept a new change if it is combined with a group of larger changes, than to try and implement a new change on it's own.

If this type of tax had been implemented right from the start when modern EVs came on the market it would simply be a small part of the calculation of owning an EV.

Waiting until now, and you get this kind of response, waiting further will not improve the public opinion.

Playing devils advocate the average weight of an ev is roughly a 1000lbs more than an equivalent ice car.

Obviously everyone will suddenly magically drive 100 miles a year if it's self reported.

And even reporting the difference each year is a problem. Not so much with digital data, but with the government.

Your car is already selling all the other information already if it's less than 10 or so years old (disclaimer- I don't know the specific number, but that's gotta be close).

Big wheels roll over potholes better.