> Electric cars and hybrids are breaking the fuel tax methodology of funding highways Then they might as well take a page off the Finnish playbook of late 1990

> Electric cars and hybrids are breaking the fuel tax methodology of funding highways Then they might as well take a page off the Finnish playbook of late 1990's. (The "financially molested" chapter, to be precise.) Finland has long had a punitive annual tax for vehicles that use diesel. After all, for a very long time, diesel was way cheaper than gas. In 1990's, the tax was ~5k FIM/year. Professional drivers had calculated that the break-even point was about 30000 km a year, and if you drove more than that, diesel was still cheaper. Then, a company came up with a fully electric van. It ran on batteries only. It was cumbersome, and it was suited for in-city travels only. Nonetheless the Finnish legislators freaked out. A car that ran on something that didn't produce tax revenue? An abomination! So they did what any (in)sensible legislators would do anywhere in the world: they mandated an extra tax to be levied on all-electric cars. Namely, 20x annual diesel tax. (A good van cost about 100k FIM at the time.) The net effect was that for the privilege of owning an all-electric vehicle you would have needed to fork out roughly the price of the new car every single year as taxes. This particular law was struck off the books a few years later, when the onslaught of hybrids and electric cars had become apparent. But it did show exactly how car owners were viewed, and how even a prospect of missed tax revenue was a cause for extreme measures.