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Governments shouldn't even consider taxing electrics. Trucks create the majority of road damage (https://www.insidescience.org/news/how-much-damage-do-heavy-tr
by djyaz1200 5y ago
Governments shouldn't even consider taxing electrics. Trucks create the majority of road damage (https://www.insidescience.org/news/how-much-damage-do-heavy-trucks-do-our-roads https://www.insidescience.org/news/how-much-damage-do-heavy-...). Trucking companies should pay for the roads along with gas powered vehicles and if that gets prohibitively expensive then get an electric car or send goods primarily by rail. This is the real challenge of fighting climate change, many powerful and wealthy classes of people and businesses are going to have to pay for more of their share of their negative externalities.
- jaclaz 5y agoBasically road pavement damage is proportional to weight of vehicles that run over them (and - to a lesser extent - to the amount of vehicles). Having more electric vehicles actually increases - on average - the weight of cars, and - indirectly - road damage (how much is to be seen in practice). For commercial fleets, trucks are already so heavy that - as you say - provoke the most damage, but they are heavy because they move things that "you/we" need or want, and that "you/we" actually pay for in the end. So, if there won't be any more income from gas-guzzling cars, and taxing the electric cars is politically not viable, what remains is that the costs will be put on comnmercial transport, which means ultimately that final users will pay more, much more for transport of the goods they buy. The traditional approach was to tax indirectly (via car related taxes) the - in theory - more affluent part of the population (that could afford to buy and maintain a car), if this source of income ceases to exist, the only way to replace it is to tax more "what remains".