[shiftpgdn]

Much of the public infrastructure in the UK is paid for based on gasoline(petrol) excise taxes. Before tax you actually pay about the same as Americans per gallon of gas. I wonder how the government will handle people switching to EVs and effectively dodging the tax.

[jdahlin]

Public infrastructure needs to be financed somehow and it would make most sense to do so based on usage of them. Energy tax, vehicle purchase tax or tolls are the three main options to do that as far as I can see.

Combustion taxes makes sense if it's only used by transportation means, but that is not the case of electric energy. You could tax at the plug/socket level, but that's probably something that will be easy to tamper with.

There could always be something fancy such as remotely tracking the vehicles, but that will open a can of privacy worms.

The only viable option is to do tolls. Not necessarily representative of actual use, but a good enough approximation of use.

[brc]

EV owners will get an extra road usage charge. It's the model already seen in some US states.

What is funny is that much of the benefit of an EV is effectively they are a rolling tax-avoidance scheme - in many cases you actually get subsidised for the purchase. The cost-to-run figures rely heavily on the lack of taxation to work out better - and this is even more so in highly-taxing regions like most European countries.

This is obviously not sustainable once larger volumes of vehicles start to appear on the road.

Of course it would make me happy if EVs became popular and avoided getting loaded down with all the other taxes that vehicles currently attract. Because then it would raise the question why all transportation is taxed so heavily.

I know I am dreaming, though. EVs will end up just as taxed as every other vehicle on the road.

[chris_mahan]

Maybe they'll tax tires/tyres.

[InclinedPlane]

Eh, it's probably fine for now for EV owners to get a break on infrastructure costs since they are a minority and there are several helpful positive externalities from EV ownership as an offset. If EVs start to make up a lot of the market then taxation can switch to a different model (licensing/mileage based, perhaps, or simply out of the general fund).