so $130 for most drivers is actually a bargain in the US too.
I’d have to drive an EV about 35% more miles each year to make it to break even on tax versus our 35 mpg ICE car. It’s no bargain, it’s punishment for driving an EV.
EVs are also much harsher on roads because of their weight.
My Hyundai Ioniq 5 weighs less than the most popular vehicle in the US: the F-150. I don’t see those getting special taxes.
How do you pay more taxes on EVs when you factor in gas taxes?
Huh? Simple math?
$MILES_PER_YEAR/$200 (EV tax in WA) vs. $GALLONS_USED * $0.18 in the ICE car. I pay more in taxes to run the EV in a year than I do for equivalent miles in a 35mpg ICE. IOW, if I drove the Scion xB all the time, I’d pay less tax.
The alternative is them checking the odometer each year on the EVs, which would be fairer, but I feel like Americans would complain that’s an invasion of their privacy or something. Or it would upset the rural voters who have disproportionate power in this country.
Modern cars are full of phone home shenanigans, many of them with cameras and ToS that allow them to observe everything and sell all of the data to anyone that can rub two cents together. IIRC laws coming into effect next year mandate even more of it. If Americans care about privacy of their cars they have a funny way of showing it. The odometer read would actually be a great privacy improvement compared to that.
I think they should just tax tires. It sounds easier to administer and if it was a natural tax it would alleviate the main weakness it seemed to have: That's you buy your tires in the state with the lowest tire tax.
I drove 15,000 miles last year and paid 33.3 cents per gallon to my state. That’s around 833.33 gallons of gas so I paid about $278 dollars. $20 more. Assuming 18mpg.
For an EV I’d pay $258.90 extra to register.
My state must be factoring in average miles driven to come up with the $258 number instead of charging per mile driven.
The weight gap between EV and ICE is often exaggerated.
In fact, within ICE vehicles, the gap between sedans/hatchbacks/compact crossovers and giant SUVs and trucks is larger, and yet for some reason we aren’t taxing drivers of Suburbans and F-150s accordingly.
If we applied this logic fairly we should be pushing people to right-size their vehicles regardless of fuel type.
Keeping things simple and calculating the axle weight to the fourth powers of both vehicles, the F-150 causes 5.4x the road wear of the Honda Accord while using only 1.6x the gas.
The reason this doesn't matter so much, though, is that the types of trucks used for shipping goods, when loaded, cause on the order of 10^4 the road wear, dwarfing any differences between standard commuter vehicles, which is why commercial trucks have to stop at weigh stations.
The big trucks also have a lot more tires / tire surface area, to mitigate that. IIUC, the weigh stations are to ensure they aren’t overloading the truck, so that road wear is comparable instead of being that vastly greater
Redditors claim there is no evidence the weight is relevant to the wear rate of the roads, since weights have become comparable to a similar car and generally less than the average ICE truck, but that the superior acceleration of EV can be harsher on intersections https://www.reddit.com/r/electriccars/comments/1do2rtu/what_...
I’d have to drive an EV about 35% more miles each year to make it to break even on tax versus our 35 mpg ICE car. It’s no bargain, it’s punishment for driving an EV.
EVs are also much harsher on roads because of their weight.
My Hyundai Ioniq 5 weighs less than the most popular vehicle in the US: the F-150. I don’t see those getting special taxes.