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Illinois proposes $1k registration fee for electric cars

1 points by vezycash 7y ago

aurizon 7y ago
I see the dirty hands of the IC car makers here. Their argument - to level the playing field versus gas in terms of taxes that are built in to gasoline/diesel. This is valid, but the average car pays $300-400 annually in gas taxes. They need to make this an annual mileage fee at renewal time to be truly level. So the car makers want to kill the atmosphere as well as boost car repair/rust money. Time to get rid of these politicians
salawat 7y ago
This doesn't make much sense seeing as the gasoline tax burden of an electric car should be getting picked up by the power company. Though, seeing as gas taxes are frequently used as proxies for road usage, I can see the concern. One can't get a thumb on road usage based on KWh from the power company or the gas used to generate that additional power since bigger turbines are quite a bit more efficient than car engine's at capturing the energy from burning a unit of fuel. Also, full EV's (at least sedans) tend to be heavier than their ICE counterparts. This may not seem to have much impact, but the damage done by a vehicle rolling down a road goes up with 4th power of the weight transferred to the surface per axle. Small increases in weight have increasingly large repercussions for road maintenance over time. I actually don't see a Machiavellian motive here. Somebody just realized that the old proxy for road usage tax to raise money for road upkeep wouldn't work for full electric vehicles. Now whether or not they did a good job at articulating why they were doing it, I leave as an exercise to the student. However, I think I could live with this. I kinda wish the formulas and math involved for stuff like policymaking for upkeep of public infrastructure was a bit more accessible. I feel like if people had a function to look at that didn't necessarily require a bunch of esoteric engineering knowledge to make sense of, tax policymaking could be treated more as the collective action mechanism it should be rather than the bogeyman everyone makes it out to be. Not that that'll ever happen.

1 points by vezycash 7y ago

I see the dirty hands of the IC car makers here. Their argument - to level the playing field versus gas in terms of taxes that are built in to gasoline/diesel. This is valid, but the average car pays $300-400 annually in gas taxes. They need to make this an annual mileage fee at renewal time to be truly level. So the car makers want to kill the atmosphere as well as boost car repair/rust money. Time to get rid of these politicians

salawat 7y ago

This doesn't make much sense seeing as the gasoline tax burden of an electric car should be getting picked up by the power company. Though, seeing as gas taxes are frequently used as proxies for road usage, I can see the concern. One can't get a thumb on road usage based on KWh from the power company or the gas used to generate that additional power since bigger turbines are quite a bit more efficient than car engine's at capturing the energy from burning a unit of fuel. Also, full EV's (at least sedans) tend to be heavier than their ICE counterparts. This may not seem to have much impact, but the damage done by a vehicle rolling down a road goes up with 4th power of the weight transferred to the surface per axle. Small increases in weight have increasingly large repercussions for road maintenance over time. I actually don't see a Machiavellian motive here. Somebody just realized that the old proxy for road usage tax to raise money for road upkeep wouldn't work for full electric vehicles. Now whether or not they did a good job at articulating why they were doing it, I leave as an exercise to the student. However, I think I could live with this. I kinda wish the formulas and math involved for stuff like policymaking for upkeep of public infrastructure was a bit more accessible. I feel like if people had a function to look at that didn't necessarily require a bunch of esoteric engineering knowledge to make sense of, tax policymaking could be treated more as the collective action mechanism it should be rather than the bogeyman everyone makes it out to be. Not that that'll ever happen.