[TacticalCoder]

> On weight. 4th power of weight, road damage is proportional to 4th power of weight.

Yup. Which is why damage due to personal vehicles, even heavy EV ones (heavy due to the batteries), is a rounding error in road damage. A single semi passing on a road shall damage it more than one million regular cars. Something insane like that.

It's totally obvious on the three-lanes european highways: the leftmost lane is never deformed like the right-most lane is. And the rightmost lane is deformed on two bands: precisely where the tires of the semis are passing.

Politicians, worldwide, always prone to steal from people, have of course planned everything: WLTP (Worldwide Harmonised Light Vehicles Test Procedure), are going to make sure they rip everybody off.

The scam is beautiful: in the EU for example... Make sure everybody switches to EV vehicles, then make sure everybody repeats "road damage is proportional to 4th power of weight" (with conveniently ignoring the issue of trucks weight), so that then you can tax vehicles that are now heavy.

While, of course, making sure that electricity prices are through the roof.

We're already at a point, in some EU countries, where superchargers on the highways cost more money than a gasoline car for the same mileage.

A tax on tires would at least make some sense. But inventing a tax on weight now that cars have heavy EV batteries is just petty.

[ben_w]

Governments don't need to "scam" people for money, and only the exceptionally useless ones attempt to "steal from people", stealing from people is corruption, not taxation, they have direct power to take whatever they want whenever they deem necessary and spend it however they want (modulo constitutional rules). Note that I'm not denying the existence of corruption here, that would be a much stronger claim, but you'd have to make a case that somehow the corruption is focussed on promoting a new novel kind of vehicle and rather than all the existing ones which have support from the existing stakeholders in manufacturing and fuel supply and presumably more cash for bribes and stuff.

Even if governments were as your rhetoric says, they have no specific desire for electricity prices to be "through the roof", as energy in general is foundational to industrial performance in the same way food is foundational to human performance. This is why gulf states, which are extremely un-democratic, set fixed (and low) fuel prices in the 1960s and only reformed their subsidies rather than removing them entirely in the 2010s.

> We're already at a point, in some EU countries, where superchargers on the highways cost more money than a gasoline car for the same mileage.

I think that says more about the superchargers than the governments.