Something needs to change. When these massive EVs (Hummers, cybertrucks, etc…) are worse for the environment and roads than other vehicles they should be paying proportionally to the damage they cause.
It’s crazy to me that somehow we’re transitioning to EV but at the same time have found a way to make them more dangerous.
worse for the environment and roads than other vehicles they should be paying proportionally to the damage they cause.
Which means the trucking industry should be paying a lot more.
Are large EVs actually worse for the environment compared to an equivalent sized ICE vehicle? I find that hard to believe.
The EVs are heavier, which causes more road wear than a similarly sized ICE and they will also produce more tire wear pollution for the same reason. Overall, they’d still be better than the ICE comparison for the environment due to no tail pipe emissions but a smaller EV would obviously be better.
I was mistaken with how much co2 they produce but here’s an article about it https://www.inverse.com/input/tech/gmc-hummer-ev-carbon-dioxide-emissions-electric-truck
they should be paying proportionally to the damage they cause
Good news, electricity is already taxed. Driving larger EVs already costs more in taxes than driving smaller, more efficient EVs.
I’m of the opinion that large heavy vehicles should pay more to use the roads than smaller light vehicles. Beyond the $20 to charge a large EV SUV. How much road tax comes from electricity? Pay for what you use ya know?
The obvious thing to do is just base the cost on your insurance and the fee to vehicle registration. But lets be real, the weight of the vehicle has an exponential effect on road wear so they should just charge heavier vehicles a registration premium regardless of fuel type
For those who don’t understand the the degree to which this matters, behold, the fourth power law of road stress:
The problem with your example is you could read it as cars cause effectively zero wear on roads, compared to a truck
If you give people in California public transportation, they would use it almost as much as New York in a year.
Many mentions of factoring weight in this thread, I believe should also consider size of vehicle, how much space the vehicle occupies on the road. Some combination of miles, weight and size.
For those asking how tracked, a prior trial used a device plugged into OBD port like some insurance companies use. That trial generated monthly billing for miles driven in state. Tracked not just miles driven, but also where the vehicle was driven. This is done so miles driven out of state are excluded from the road charge. Not perfect as miles driven inside national park (Federal not state maintained) were included in the billing. Hopefully that big was fixed.
I like concept but the very real privacy issues, uh, not so much
Haha fuck that, you really wanna collect even more information for the gestapo administration?
Electricity is already taxed.
We don’t need more government tracking of our every move.
The electric tax doesn’t go towards fixing roads, though. That’s why it needs to change, otherwise the only people paying into that are non-electric car owners.
I totally agree that the government shouldn’t have more of our data, so I looked up how the pilot program worked and honestly I’m not too mad about it. There are 3 options:
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OBD-II device that reads your odometer and sends that in to be tracked. It has an OPTIONAL GPS which, if turned on, will make sure to only tax the miles driven in California (so it would not apply to miles while out of state). If turned off then all miles are taxed.
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Car Telemetry that’s already in newer cars that can phone home and send the numbers in (This is my lease favorite)
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You simply take a picture of your odometer and submit it. No invasion of privacy and seeing where you’re going. This is the one I like the best.
All of those are overhead-riddled runarounds that could be avoided entirely by the state simply allocating the tax dollars it’s already collected in a different manner, which ought to be well within its capability to do.
Anyway, if all they cared about was your odometer reading they get that already when you renew your vehicle registration. They could just charge you then – when you’re already standing there with your checkbook anyway – and not need to create and hire an entire new department to review people’s potato pictures of their dashboards.
All of those are overhead-riddled runarounds that could be avoided entirely by the state simply allocating the tax dollars it’s already collected in a different manner, which ought to be well within its capability to do.
Are you saying that problems could be fixed simply by better allocating existing taxes? That’s what it sounds like. Tax revenue collected from gasoline sales is bound to drop as less and less ICE vehicles are used. Something will have to compensate for that drop.
Well, one source I found with a cursory search indicates that California spent about $15.1 billion, with a B, on its police in 2023. So I can think of a good place to start.
Anyway, I was following on to the above poster’s observation that electricity is already heavily taxed in CA. Just, none of that cash is allocated towards transportation (or at least in any significant manner insofar as I’m aware) I imagine because historically transportation and power consumption have not been intrinsically linked as they would become if electric vehicles become ubiquitous.
California already has the highest electricity rates in the country by a significant margin, and now they’re also doing stuff like this, which makes you wonder just what the hell they expect to be doing with all that surcharge money if it’s not modernizing their power distribution and soon-to-be electrically driven transportation infrastructure. In fact, incentivizing a switch to electric infrastructure including vehicles was supposed to be one of the stated intentions of that scheme, although it’s dubious if things will actually shake out that way in reality.
One thing’s for sure, the more they can structure their scheme so that it works via even collective contribution rather than making it appear to specifically punish individual drivers/owners, the much less pushback they’re going to get on it.
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I followed the link, then the link to the California Road charge web site. What I was looking for and didn’t find in any place is: “How will the mileage be monitored and how will the fee be collected?” I think those are important questions before one could decide if this is a good plan.
I personally like the idea of taxing tires instead. Since the wear and tear on roads is in direct causation to weight, the faster a tire wears out (because of weight) the more damage to roads would be caused. This means that lighter cars, causing less damage, would replace their tires less frequently, meaning paying less tax.
However, large heavy trucks that do the most damage also would have to replace their tires more often and thereby shoulder more of the burden of road repair, which is appropriate because heavy vehicles are doing much more of the damage.
If a tire tax is to generate enough money for that purpose then it’ll significantly increase the cost of tires. As a consequence, lower income earners will not replace their tires when they should, leading to more road accidents.
As a consequence, lower income earners will not replace their tires when they should, leading to more road accidents.
I’m not a California native, but a quick google search shows that California already has vehicle inspection requirements and if they fail, they are not legal to drive on California roads. Tire wear check could be added as one of those things check and fail it, if tires are in need of replacement.
