11 ms·

Taxing the purchase of a car seems non-sensical to me. It is not, so much, the ownership that is the problem, but the use of the car that creates congestion and

• insertnickname 9y ago
  More than half of the price of gas in Denmark is taxes.
  • Tepix 9y ago
    Same in Germany, in 2014 it was 59%. In 25 of 28 EU states fuel was even more expensive than in Germany.
• TulliusCicero 9y ago
  > Tax fuel That accounts for fossil fuel cars but not electric ones. > bring in road pricing A fine idea except it's logistically difficult to implement tolls everywhere.
  • marak830 9y ago
    Well cars have odometers don't they, tax based on that.
    • squimmy 9y ago
      Are you suggesting the Danish should be taxed for travelling they might well have done in Sweden?
      • wodenokoto 9y ago
        "The Danes" or "the Danish citizen". "Danish" is an adjective or a cake.
      • TorKlingberg 9y ago
        If the car was registered in Sweden they'd be paying tax there. If the per-mile tax is similar and there are a similar number of Danes driving in Sweden and Swedes driving in Denmark it evens out.
    • gambiting 9y ago
      People do drive abroad you know. If I do most(or any percentage) of my miles abroad why would I pay tax on those miles where the car is registered? Meantime, I buy the fuel in those other countries, paying tax there. No idea how to solve that for electric vehicles. Presumably still at the point of charging.
      • awjr 9y ago
        The consensus is around some sort of road pricing either through ANPR cameras or telematic boxes. Fuel duty revenue in the UK is £28billion. That's a big hole to fill.
        • gambiting 9y ago
          At the moment driving electric cars is so cheap because we buy electricity at domestic prices. It's as if we were buying utility oil(red diesel) for cars - then it would be stupidly cheap, no? There's a good reason it has been made illegal and you can't use heating oil for your car even though technically it would work just as well. I suspect that eventually you will be able to charge your electric car only from an approved charger that bills you a higher-rate car tariff, just like you can only use fuel sold at a petrol station in your car. As for the telematics - excuse me saying so, but the UK government can fuck off with suggesting even more surveillance, it's hard to fight off insurers installing telematics boxes as it is already.
          • 7952 9y ago
            I get the concern about surveillence. But I can see some amazing benefits of treating cars and the road as a single connected system. You could hold vehicles at the journey start point until space on the road opens up. Or adjust speed limits in real time depending on conditions. And maybe even remove traffic calming by modifying user speeds. The free-for-all we have now is hopelessly disfunctional and drivers suffer from that.
            • gambiting 9y ago
    • mrweasel 9y ago
      Then you just create a different problem, or in case of Denmark, contribute to an existing one. You're going to make the poor worse of. Taxing on kilometers driven is unfairly hard towards those who cannot afford to live close to their place of employment. To the wealthy it won't matter much if you tax the purchase of the car or the kilometers driven. Those making below the average salary are normally excluded from living in the center of the cities, and is in some cases even forced outside the bus routes. Also Danish public transit is notoriously bad outside the four largest cities.
      • icebraining 9y ago
        How is it any worse than the current tax on gas, though?
        • mrweasel 9y ago
          It's not, but it is different to taxing the sales price of a new car, which was how I understood the idea.
        • eeZah7Ux 9y ago
          Taxing fuel it's better as it correlates quite well with engine size and usage and therefore pollution.
      • adrianN 9y ago
        I don't know how it in in Denmark, but wealthy people often live in nice houses in the suburbs and commute by car. Here in Berlin at least that is the case. The fuel taxes are offset by tax deductions for commuter miles though.
        • mrweasel 9y ago
          Well that true in Denmark as well, but both the city centers and the suburbs are pretty expensive, so risk getting pushed past those, and then you start getting into areas where public transport is basically non-existing.
        • 9y ago
  • awjr 9y ago
    I suspect, requiring all cars to have a telematic device is the answer here. Insurance companies are already using these and the behaviour of individuals drastically improves when one is installed. This has an advantage in enabling provision of a device at country borders etc. Another option is to develop a cheap Automatic Number Plate Camera and create a network of cameras across our road systems. Both approaches not only allow road pricing strategies, but also address speeding. This may be a bit big brother for some but this is pretty much the way I see us heading.
    • Already__Taken 9y ago
      a complete big brother The future is going to be dreadful isn't it.
      • TeMPOraL 9y ago
        Blame the drivers. If most drivers weren't showing utter disregard to traffic laws pretty much all the time, there wouldn't be a dire need for ALPRs to curb speeding.
        • fivestar 9y ago
          And if speed limits were set to what people really drive you would see a huge drop off in speeding! People ignore things that are increasingly obviously stupid. Any time a large majority of drivers are ignoring the rules it's an engineering problem, not a driver problem.
          • TulliusCicero 9y ago
            I basically agree, the problem is that we tend to say, "we want to make this road safe by making it tolerant of faster driving" which basically translates to encouraging faster driving because drivers base their speed on what feels appropriate.
          • TeMPOraL 9y ago
            > People ignore things that are increasingly obviously stupid. Except that if you look at it from a little higher vantage point than driver seat, it seems obvious that it's those people who are stupid.
  • Zekio 9y ago
    Well electricity is so heavily taxed in Denmark the price for electricity is multiplied multiple times over. The actual cost like 90% of the price is taxes if I remember correctly. So taxes for electric cars "Fuel" have already been accounted for. Edit: grammar is hard
    • olau 9y ago
      It's about 70%. If you only count the electricity specific taxes, it's around 50%. Fresh numbers from todays elpris.dk - øre = Danish cents (yes, they are called ears). Cost of production: 26,05 øre/kWh Transmission: 35,19 øre/kWh Taxes: 105,40 øre/kWh VAT (25,00 pct.) 41,66 øre/kWh In total: 208,31 øre/kWh
  • lucaspiller 9y ago
    A lot of European countries have vignette stickers (often only for buses/HGVs), which are needed to travel on highways. The sticker attaches to the inside of the windscreen. The only infrastructure/logistics needed is to sell the stickers to fuel stations, and a few signs when entering the country. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vignette_(road_tax) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vignette_(road_tax)
    • adrianN 9y ago
      The EU plans to introduce a common system for road charges in a couple of years: https://www.euractiv.com/section/road-charging/news/fifteen-eu-countries-will-be-forced-to-change-road-toll-laws-under-draft-rules/ https://www.euractiv.com/section/road-charging/news/fifteen-...
• roel_v 9y ago
  These taxes are from a time when cars were a status symbol; they're (most would say 'they were', but that I disagree with - nominally, yes, but I'm talking about popular support for the underlying sentiment) not so much a tax to stimulate environmentally responsible behavior as they are a tax to 'punish' ostentatious displays of wealth. It's the same as the 'BPM' tax here in the Netherlands. It's, at its core, a "protestant austerity" thing.
  • avar 9y ago
    If the BPM isn't a tax to stimulate environmentally responsible behavior why is it a direct function of CO^2 emissions, with no tax payable on zero-emission vehicles, no matter how mch they cost or how much of a display of wealth the are? 1. https://www.belastingdienst.nl/wps/wcm/connect/bldcontenten/belastingdienst/individuals/cars/bpm/calculate_and_pay_bpm/bpm_tariff/ https://www.belastingdienst.nl/wps/wcm/connect/bldcontenten/...
    • roel_v 9y ago
      Yes, that's what it is now nominally (especially now that it's directly related to CO2 emissions). But what I meant was - these taxes existed in a time when nobody cared about that. The BPM was even called a 'luxury tax'. It's a way to tax 'excessive' consumption, which is how cars were (are?) seen. The justification, on the surface, has changed nowadays. My point was, though, that the relatively wide spread acceptance of this sort of tax is not because everybody is so environmentally conscious; it's because it's a function of the cultural instinct to 'punish' those who flaunt wealth. Or if you don't want to call it 'punishment', at least to make those who want to drive luxury cars pay more on top of the taxes they need to pay that also apply to other goods (i.e., VAT). I mean, if those taxes were to make those driving cars pay for the building of roads and to counter emissions, you'd charge a flat fee, or a per-kilometer fee. You wouldn't tax them proportional to the list price of the car. A 250k Lamborghini doesn't wear out roads more than a Kia, but it costs several times the purchase price of the Kia just in taxes. So my remark was that, despite today's bend of environmentalism, these taxes need to be seen in the context of the broader societal mores of egalitarianism; or 'suppression of those that show wealth in socially not accepted ways', depending on how you want to spin it.
• notauser 9y ago
  Taxing vehicle use is a great idea, but vehicle ownership also has negative externalities which means it is appropriate to tax buying or owning a car including: - Polution created by making a car. - Cost of parking, especially in cities: - parking takes up space, making it harder to walk between things - street parking is untidy / ugly - street parking obstructs traffic, bike lanes and bus lanes - the need for large parking lots drives up the cost of building, which is passed on to drivers and non-drivers alike Even in suburban areas having the streets full of parked cars has negative effects like reducing the space available for children to play.
  • lmm 9y ago
    > - Polution created by making a car. No different from making any other object - you might as well tax e.g. TVs if that's the rationale. > - Cost of parking, especially in cities: Agreed, but better solved by disallowing street parking and taxing land ownership. Again, tax the parts that introduce the negative externalities as directly as possible, otherwise you create perverse incentives.
    • TeMPOraL 9y ago
      Agreed RE parking, but RE taxing TV - well, I'd say sure, tax it too. The more I think of it, the more it seems to me that a general CO₂ emission tax would help solve so many problems in the current world...
      • adrianN 9y ago
        Most people who think about it and are not politicians seem to think that a carbon tax or a cap and trade system would be a very good tool to prevent global warming from getting even worse.
  • Reason077 9y ago
    This is actually a significant problem in the UK. You could create a much better environment for pedestrians and cyclists if city streets weren't clogged with parked cars all the time. Danish streets do seem to be much clearer, even in areas that have similar road conditions and population density to UK cities.
• avar 9y ago
  You can't selectively tax certain goods without creating a market failure. E.g. if the purchase of cars isn't taxed I'll just import €10,000 of audio equipment by buying an old beater, then ripping out and selling the sound system and selling the car for scrap, while making a big profit because I'll be competing with local sellers that have to pay import tax on sound systems.
  • notauser 9y ago
    This happens with cargo vans in the US, which are imported as passenger vans before being converted, to avoid a 25% tarrif on the import of cargo vans. http://blog.caranddriver.com/feds-watching-fords-run-around-on-chicken-tax-riles-customs-officials/ http://blog.caranddriver.com/feds-watching-fords-run-around-... However I'd challenge that this is a market failure - this is an example of the failure of a rules-based approach to regulation. In countries which take a principles-based approach to regulation then the substance of the transation is considered as well as the form. So this kind of nit-picking to circumnavigate the rules wouldn't have been allowed.
    • avar 9y ago
      What would you call it then? Market failures can also be created by ineffective regulation, as is the case in my example. Considering the substance of the transaction isn't a viable strategy, it might be possible at larger scales as in your Ford example, but individuals can and will find clever ways around tariffs that are impossible for the authorities to keep up with. As an example, I lived in a European country where import tolls on bicycles were much higher than the import fees on spare parts, so if the price of shipping was low enough you could simply ask the seller to send over a bike in multiple packages marked as spare parts to evade the import fees. How are you going to detect cases like that with perfect accuracy? You'd need some massive tracking system to figure out who bought what, and even then it could be trivially evaded by me and a friend buying 1/2 of two bikes each as spare parts and combining them after they've been imported.
  • relix 9y ago
    Audio equipment is not taxed at 100%.
• kawsper 9y ago
  Denmark are taxing fuel and requires you to pay "vægtafgift" (weight-tax, based on how much your vehicle weighs) and "grøn ejerafgift" (green owner tax, how efficient your car is per liter of gasoline) to be allowed to drive on the roads.
  • kagamine 9y ago
    For anyone interested, here is the govt. calculator in English (almost) for cost of import into Norway: https://www.skatteetaten.no/en/person/cars-and-other-vehicles/import-car/calculate/calculator-import/ https://www.skatteetaten.no/en/person/cars-and-other-vehicle...
  • izym 9y ago
    Vægtafgift is not a thing anymore, there is only ejerafgift now.
• fulafel 9y ago
  The main harm from cars are co2 emissions, and electric car emissions are weighted to manufacturing and raw materials. So it makes sense to tax their purchase.