4 ms·
They should make a separate road tax instead of mixing up all sorts of taxes in fuel. Actually there is one for national roads or highways but they'd have to ta
by petre 5y ago
They should make a separate road tax instead of mixing up all sorts of taxes in fuel. Actually there is one for national roads or highways but they'd have to tax by distance, so taxing fuel is an easy one. In Europe we pay more taxes than what the fuel actually costs so obviously people are quite incentivized getting an EV. Which is good news because: no fumes.
- kingsuper20 5y agoI expect that they'll simply have a road tax and a gas tax.
- lotsofpulp 5y agoTexas and many other places already have a road tax, called a toll.
- detaro 5y agoFuel use is not a bad proxy though for ICE cars, so it made sense: People who drive more (and cause more road wear) pay more, heavy vehicles (which cause more road wear) pay more. Efficient vehicles are incentivized. And not a fan of calls for taxes based on actual distance driven, because tracking that leads to monitoring I'd rather the state not have.
- petre 5y agoYes but there's no need for monitoring anything other than the distance driven. We already have cameras monitoring license plates to identify owners that have not paid their fixed road tax. They could tax the electricity at charging stations, but then people would rather charge at home. For the roads in the county or region we already pay car property taxes.
- detaro 5y agoAnd how do you monitor that? I don't see just trusting the mileage counter in the car being something that goes through, even though modern cars do go through some effort to prevent modifying that. I guess maybe, at least for cars meeting some standard in that regard?
- petre 5y agoCameras or RFID readers in the road? The same way they catch thieves in stores. They know the distance between gate A and B on roads between cities and between city entry and exit points. One just needs a RFID with the VIN or license plate encoded in it. For trucks they already have tachographs which record lots driving parameters but mainly distance, speed, driving time, violations. Gen2 also records GPS coorinates at start and stop so it's harder to defeat. The fleet operators need to keep those records for two years. Penalties for modifying a tachograph are quite high, tens of thousands of euros. Someone driving a lot in a certain place probably lives already pays property taxes. If they don't register the vehicle there after six months or so it's the police's business to make sure they do. You see, they don't have to monitor everything very precisely, just 95% or so.
- detaro 5y agoYeah, that's what I'd put as "too much monitoring" already, although I realize in the US with license plate scanning companies etc privacy in that regard is pretty much not a thing anyways.