General > General Technical Chat
EV-based road transportation is not viable
tom66:
--- Quote from: tggzzz on February 19, 2023, 11:45:30 pm ---Someone has to pay for the roads. Currently in the UK the payment is indirect through taxes on ICE fuel. That works: easy to collect and proportional to usage. That isn't a bad starting point for the future. I believe removing the subsidy on BEVs will have to happen, and it won't be unpopular.
--- End quote ---
In the UK, taxes are not hypothecated. Roads are mostly paid for by council tax at the local level, and by central government funding which comes from everything. Trunk routes are paid through and maintained by central government except where adopted by the local authority. (It's complicated to say the least.) Needless to say, fuel taxes plus vehicle excise duty, take in around twice as much as is used to maintain their usage if you want to assign the taxes to a particular cause. The majority of the roads you drive on (your local area) are probably funded by your council tax, and not the petrol you buy. Sounds fair, right?
I agree someone needs to pay for the roads, though there's clearly not an imminent shortfall in terms of the money the government is actually spending (doubtless given the condition of many, more needs to be spent.) In the long term, some form of electric vehicle taxation will be needed, though it does present challenges when they can be filled up from virtually any electrical source.
nctnico:
--- Quote from: tom66 on February 20, 2023, 08:04:55 am ---
--- Quote from: nctnico on February 19, 2023, 11:31:41 pm ---
--- Quote from: tom66 on February 19, 2023, 02:17:04 pm ---It's a typical anti-EV policy by a government that's opposed to them for various reasons. From a quick Google it appears that Victoria state has huge oil and gas refining and resource, so you can imagine the lobbyists have a lot of influence.
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It is not anti-EV policy. The reality is that traditionally a lot of taxes are collected through the sales of fuel in order to have people who travel a lot, pay more to maintain the roads. There is nothing wrong with that and BEV owners will have to pay their share of the costs for keeping the roads in good order. BEV taxes are inevitable; the lack thereoff is simply a form of subsidy which will have to end at some point. In the Netherlands BEV owners will start paying road taxes after next year for example and likely there will be a tax per km as well coming soon.
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It's an anti-EV policy when they exist in such low numbers; it's deliberately designed to reduce their adoption by a state with vested interests in oil continuing to be used for transport. I don't have a problem with EV's being taxed when they're a significant proportion of the vehicle market.
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No. It is better to tax from the beginning so people won't complain about being hit wit a tax 'all of the sudden'. Or people claiming it is an anti-EV tax... In reality, the costs of BEVs have dropped quite significantly so subsidies in the form of tax cuts are no longer necessary.
tggzzz:
--- Quote from: tom66 on February 20, 2023, 08:11:11 am ---
--- Quote from: tggzzz on February 19, 2023, 11:45:30 pm ---Someone has to pay for the roads. Currently in the UK the payment is indirect through taxes on ICE fuel. That works: easy to collect and proportional to usage. That isn't a bad starting point for the future. I believe removing the subsidy on BEVs will have to happen, and it won't be unpopular.
--- End quote ---
In the UK, taxes are not hypothecated. Roads are mostly paid for by council tax at the local level, and by central government funding which comes from everything. Trunk routes are paid through and maintained by central government except where adopted by the local authority. (It's complicated to say the least.) Needless to say, fuel taxes plus vehicle excise duty, take in around twice as much as is used to maintain their usage if you want to assign the taxes to a particular cause. The majority of the roads you drive on (your local area) are probably funded by your council tax, and not the petrol you buy. Sounds fair, right?
I agree someone needs to pay for the roads, though there's clearly not an imminent shortfall in terms of the money the government is actually spending (doubtless given the condition of many, more needs to be spent.) In the long term, some form of electric vehicle taxation will be needed, though it does present challenges when they can be filled up from virtually any electrical source.
--- End quote ---
I'm glad you agree (by omission) that EVs not paying tax is a subsidy that needs to be removed.
The exact mechanisms, however convoluted, by which the cost of infrastructure is collected is far less important than:
* collecting the cost, somehow
* being fair in that more usage leads to more cost
Someone:
--- Quote from: karpouzi9 on February 19, 2023, 08:51:29 am ---3c per km is unreasonably high imo. What are fuel taxes, $1.50 a liter?
--- End quote ---
Your (absent) maths is crap, at $1.50 per litre (pure tax) and 7l/100km would be 10.5c/km.... what production car runs along at 2l/100km????
--- Quote from: Someone on January 31, 2023, 12:24:31 am ---
--- Quote from: nctnico on January 30, 2023, 10:33:44 pm ---
--- Quote from: tom66 on January 30, 2023, 10:04:26 pm ---
--- Quote from: AVGresponding on January 30, 2023, 08:22:13 pm ---This would almost certainly contravene GDPR, and won't happen. The simplest way is to tax electricity at the point of use, and to charge more, the more is used, rather than discounting it for heavier users.
--- End quote ---
And solar users pay no tax? No, road charging is the only way to make it fair, on the basis of replacing fuel tax.
--- End quote ---
Yep. In the NL there are also plans to tax per distance travelled. But the problem is that the NL is a small country and there is a significant number of people that drive significant distances outside the country.
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:-DD and that is somehow completely different from people buying fuel (with its high taxes to offset the externalities such as road costs its use creates) in one jurisdiction but driving in another?
Per km road use fees already exist to solve this funding "problem" for EVs:
https://www.vicroads.vic.gov.au/registration/registration-fees/zlev-road-user-charge
the 2.6c/km rate puts EVs at equivalent taxation to a fossil burner with 5.9l/100km fuel consumption (perhaps a little higher than the current EU new car average)
--- End quote ---
tom66:
--- Quote from: tggzzz on February 20, 2023, 08:58:22 am ---I'm glad you agree (by omission) that EVs not paying tax is a subsidy that needs to be removed.
--- End quote ---
No. I've never disagreed that EVs may eventually need to be taxed, if you go back 20 or so pages (man this discussion has gone on too long.) It's not an easy problem to solve though - probably requires road charging to be fair because there will be some who can charge on home electricity or from solar and pay much less tax than e.g. a levy on public charging. Road charging is very expensive to do, requiring either tamperproof metering on each car (you can't use MOT mileage because private mileage, other drivers, out of the country, etc. plus odometer tampering is trivial) or some kind of ANPR system (which inevitably would only capture some types of user, and is really expensive to do for e.g. rural countryside, so you have the side effect of people avoiding express routes to avoid tax; see also M6 Toll.) That's why I think it might not even happen and instead the taxation just comes from somewhere else, like income tax or a higher VAT chargeable on new cars, but predicting the future on tax is even more nebulous than for the future of transport.
It's worth noting EV users do already pay some tax - 20% VAT is applied on public charging and 5% VAT on home electricity. This is of course less than fuel duty.
The problem is on one hand, you argue EV's are too expensive and inconvenient for the general consumer and now you want to apply taxation to their usage to counter some of their benefits in terms of low cost of operation. The end goal is to electrify transport, to allow zero emissions driving. I'd be also opposed to a tax on hydrogen cars (even if I don't think they're feasible.) We should be promoting ZEV usage in the time when people are taking a risk on a newer technology, not discouraging their take up.
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