OP copied the title from the article, but it seems weird to specifically call out Tesla when this legislation applies to all Electric Vehicles. I guess Tesla gets clicks?
A counterargument would be that cars cause basically no road damage and it’s all caused by trucks. Studies have put the damage of a single truck at weight limit in the US to be equal to that of 9600 cars[1].
A counter argument is that we have a lot of road capacity for all the cars. I agree that heavier vehicles should pay a greater share, but we don’t have eight lane highways just for trucks.
A Texan driver would have to buy 2000 gallons of gas a year to pay $400 in gas taxes to Texas. That seems pretty high when the average Texan drives 16347 miles per year [1]; it implies fuel economy of only 8.2 MPG at average travel distance. Even the big Ford F-450 has better average fuel economy than that.
In Texas cars don’t pay gas taxes either effectively. There is a tiny tax of 20c/gal. but that’s nowhere near this (another poster made a calculation of $60/yr roughly).
Just make this $150/yr, charge $1/gal tax for ICE cars, that should make it about even.
For comparison I pay $1500 yearly road tax and $4/gal in taxes alone at the pump and I find it too cheap to pollute still.
This will become a very big issue in most places. Especially in Europe, governments rake in huge amounts from taxes on fuel, for instance. All gone as it stands if everyone drives an EV. EVs will be taxed one way or another.
They should make a separate road tax instead of mixing up all sorts of taxes in fuel. Actually there is one for national roads or highways but they'd have to tax by distance, so taxing fuel is an easy one. In Europe we pay more taxes than what the fuel actually costs so obviously people are quite incentivized getting an EV. Which is good news because: no fumes.
Fuel use is not a bad proxy though for ICE cars, so it made sense: People who drive more (and cause more road wear) pay more, heavy vehicles (which cause more road wear) pay more. Efficient vehicles are incentivized. And not a fan of calls for taxes based on actual distance driven, because tracking that leads to monitoring I'd rather the state not have.
Yes but there's no need for monitoring anything other than the distance driven. We already have cameras monitoring license plates to identify owners that have not paid their fixed road tax. They could tax the electricity at charging stations, but then people would rather charge at home. For the roads in the county or region we already pay car property taxes.
And how do you monitor that? I don't see just trusting the mileage counter in the car being something that goes through, even though modern cars do go through some effort to prevent modifying that. I guess maybe, at least for cars meeting some standard in that regard?
Cameras or RFID readers in the road? The same way they catch thieves in stores. They know the distance between gate A and B on roads between cities and between city entry and exit points. One just needs a RFID with the VIN or license plate encoded in it.
For trucks they already have tachographs which record lots driving parameters but mainly distance, speed, driving time, violations. Gen2 also records GPS coorinates at start and stop so it's harder to defeat. The fleet operators need to keep those records for two years. Penalties for modifying a tachograph are quite high, tens of thousands of euros.
Someone driving a lot in a certain place probably lives already pays property taxes. If they don't register the vehicle there after six months or so it's the police's business to make sure they do.
You see, they don't have to monitor everything very precisely, just 95% or so.
Yeah, that's what I'd put as "too much monitoring" already, although I realize in the US with license plate scanning companies etc privacy in that regard is pretty much not a thing anyways.
This was debated in Denmark recently, and the figure that made headlines was astounding. The danish government reaps 50 Billion kr annually, or 8 Billion USD, or 1,300 USD per INHABITANT per year, in vehicle related taxes. That’s 5% of the state income, making untaxed EVs an existential threat.
I'm a Tesla driver in Texas. If part of the fee were directed to putting at least 2 charging stations at every highway rest stop, and Texas welcome center, as well as a few other places -- then I would support it. On the other hand, if the Biden administration is already going to do this with federal money -- then I don't.
Do gasoline taxes go towards providing filling stations at convenient places? I thought they were - at least in theory - supposed to go towards highway maintenance. In which case it seems only right that you should pay some kind of fee or tax towards this; after all, your Tesla uses the same roads as any other car.
Eh, 17 states already charge EVs and those numbers are going to go up.
Just a back of the envelope estimate:
With Federal gas taxes of 20 cents per gallon and state levies ranging from 20-60 cents, let's say an average of 40 cents for a total of 60 cents a gallon. ~120 Billion gallons of gas are used each year, say 200 million adult drivers means each adult is paying around .6*120B/.2B = $360 per year in gas taxes. $400 seems to be a reasonable ballpark for the gas tax revenue lost per year.
That's not a revenue stream governments are going to be willing to lose, so as EV popularity increases, you can expect more of this. It doesn't seem too awful, TBH. The alternative would be to have a special levy on electricity, similar to what we do with gasoline, but that's going to hit a lot more than PEV drivers, so if we fund roads with use fees, which we currently do, then paying a few hundred bucks a year in lieu of gas taxes seems fair.
WA has similar fees for electric vehicles and the main problem is the fact that it's a flat fee. With gas taxes you inherently pay more if you drive more, whereas EV owners pay the same regardless of how much they drive. Moreover, it's a $225 fee which is what a 30mpg gas car would pay for driving ~15k miles or so.
This TX bill seems to have a flat fee + another fee based on mileage, which sounds more reasonable.
Texas is already short on their highway funds. Only 41% are funded by use fees[0].
Back of the napkin for me says it should be about $0.40/gal given the Texas gas tax is $0.20.
Either way, I suspect that even this is too low and Texas is due for an increase in the gas tax by another $0.10-$0.20 in the next few years. This $400 fee will most likely be the EV taxes moving first, in my estimation.
Texas gas taxes are $0.20 state tax, plus $0.184 Federal tax for $0.384 per gallon total.
$400 / $0.384 = 1042 gallons of gasoline in equivalent taxes.
Typical annual mileage per vehicle runs around 12,000 miles. Most cars get much better than the 11.51 mpg implied by the tax.
So Texas EV users are being financially punished for cleaning up the air. Which is very, very much on-brand for Texas. I'm amazed they aren't outlawed.
With the exception of a couple of toll roads here and there and no doubt some complexity in some state's legilation, we absolutely do not fund roads with use fees. These are all general fund taxes, not earmarked in any meaningful way. And in any case the revenue they generate doesn't come even remotely close to the cost of maintaining the ground transportation network.
This point just doesn't hold, sorry.
I mean, fine. Maybe the gas tax is unfair and we should replace it with something more neutral. Or maybe the gas tax should be viewed as a "sin tax" the way taxes on alcohol and cigarettes and tanning are. Maybe it should be higher, if that's the case.
But whatever side you decide to come down on, wanting a steady source of revenue for road maintenance just isn't related.
In this case, the Texas legislature clearly wants to stick it to the dirty fucking hippies. Their roads are fine and they know it.
(That said, if Texas were to institute a new tax on electrical generation to better regulate its disastrous distribution network, maybe there would be an argument...)
The problem is that road damage is not primarily caused by cars, but heavy trucks who do not pay for it proportionally. This represents a massive subsidy that has caused rail transport to decline and shift instead to trucks which not only trash roads but kill and maim tons of people while doing so.
That's clearly a less than great outcome that could be remedied through taxation and regulation, but not if you start at taxing EVs.
Trucks pay higher tax rates for diesel, but I don't think the point of use fees must be to charge people for how much damage they do to the roads but how much benefit they obtain from the roads.
This is very tricky because roads have so many positive externalities. Even if you live in a walkable neighborhood and don't own a car, you will walk to stores that have goods delivered to them by truck, right to your neighborhood, so you can walk up and buy them. Without all those trucks bringing things close to where you live, you wouldn't have that convenience and would need to get a car yourself. Probably a heavy car since you'd have to haul everything yourself -- everyone would need to drive right up to the factory gate and then transport it back for every good you buy. Imagine what that would do to the road quality! So trucks help use the road more efficiently and actually save the road relative the alternative of not having dedicated trucking.
And not only that, but that fact means local stores are in competition with stores farther away, which drives down prices. So even people who never drive obtain many valuable benefits from the roads that connect their neighborhood to other neighborhoods, and many of these benefits are delivered, so to speak, by trucks. Thus everyone pays for these benefits.
This idea that once there is a road connecting two markets, that prices begin to equalize in them was one of the things observed by Adam Smith when he talked about how local shopkeepers often opposed roads connecting their town to towns with larger markets (and cheaper goods). Now they don't equalize perfectly, they equalize up to transportation costs. Thus lowering transportation costs for the trucks that ship goods between markets results in lower prices for everyone who buys those goods, even if they don't use the road themselves. This is why it makes sense to subsidize the transportation of goods.
Thus our current system makes sense, roads are paid in part from general funds, in part from use fees, and there are some extra fees added to trucks.
> This is why it makes sense to subsidize the transportation of goods.
Subsidise ecological transport, not diesel fumes blown to my face when I walk to my market to buy local produce, not hauled from across continent (I don't really care, but know people who do and they don't seem to sacrifice ton of their life quality by living waste-free).
Looks like in Texas the gas tax is $0.20/gallon. A sedan might get 33 miles per gallon, drive 10,000 miles a year, consuming 300 gallons of gas: $60 paid in taxes each year.
Is that right?
The US average looks like 25 mpg and 14,000 miles driven, 560 gallons: $112 or with federal taxes $215.
Not a complex fix. Send in your mileage when renewing the licensing. With the monitoring of new vehicles, you could probably have the manufacturer send it in. Pay a per mile roads tax.
Unfortunately too many proposals want to overcharge and or use Orwellian gps surveillance to determine something simple like mileage.
When the new Transportation Secretary floated this idea a little while back, somewhat unexpectedly, he had to really quickly walk it back because of the backlash. Having trouble finding a halfway decent news article, but this describes a bit:
taxing gas doesn't stop people from buying gas... taxing cigarettes' doesn't stop people from smoking.
While I question the intelligence and timing of taxing cars... taxing tires would stop people from replacing tires more than any other rising cost, how?
I also question whether they would "remove" the gas tax... I also question why people wouldn't cross state lines to save money (depending on tax and/or distances - same as nearby where Delaware has no sales tax but the business taxes are higher so it kinda balances out).
It's not a direct correlation, but there appears to be a cliff when people stop driving as much or exchange high consumption vehicles for lower consumption. You can see this effect when gas taxes go up in various states, and also comparing Europe to the USA.
> taxing cigarettes' doesn't stop people from smoking.
It very much does. Every time a state increases their tobacco tax, smoking rates go down.
Having worn tires is already illegal. But surprisingly, there is a high correlation between race and tickets for bald tires, and I'm willing to bet that one race is not replacing their tires more often than another.
Given that replacing tires costs a not insignificant sum, and that one race is much more likely than others to be wealthy, I'm willing to be there is at least some correlation.
You would tax a vehicle per mile-ton, which accounts for both usage and relative wear on the roads. A tire tax is too indirect, because different tires wear differently even on the same car.
We have to offset the road funding derived from a gas tax somewhere. This is clearly an underhanded way to offset it, at the detriment to EV, but it has to come from somewhere.
My preference would be weight-weighted VMT, but that’s a complex solution to implement and manage. And dump truck owners will have a fit.
I like the idea of a tire tax... but question whether you could realistically expect a tax to end (gas tax). You think those in power will give up money when they could simply have more money?
This is pretty meaningless though since that 18 wheeler is transporting your magnum condoms to walmart so it's just going to be passed back onto you in higher prices when you next want to create balloon animals.
The idea that any and all cost increases to businesses are directly passed on to the consumer is overly simplistic, and would logically mean that we should never make businesses pay for anything extra ever.
That's generally how it does work. I mean, yeah, when you hit a certain point, you might forego a bit of profitability a little here and there, but if you can't even get the stuff where it needs to be to do good for less than $X when it used to be $Y where Y<X for less than your overhead + outlay, you have to bump your price ask up to reflect the market reality.
It feels like it shouldn't be that way, but a surprisingly large amount of what makes the modern world work is proxying and physical caching as a business model.
Road maintenance fees should not be attached to the price of gasoline. The wear and tear on the road is a function of the weight of the vehicle and the miles driven.
The best place to figure out the fee should be the annual inspection. Plug into the computer, check the mileage, and calculate how many miles were driven since the last inspection. Put it into a calculator, and send out the fee.
Most of the road wear is from trucks, anyway. And I mean big rigs, not an F-150.
I don't have a ready source to back this up but I read someones comment that said there is a wide disparity between how roads and highways are paid for. Cities pay for their roads out of their general budget usually.
A lot of states have passed these laws, but it seems like a silly way to solve the problem.
When you register your car, you have to say how many miles you drove, and it gets verified every few years with smog checks.
Why not just charge a per mile-ton fee? Maybe give freight trucks a break so we don't kill shipping, or only charge them for their empty weight? Have some of the fee go to the state and some go federally for redistribution (like gas taxes work now).
Then eliminate the gas tax as a source of funding for road maintenance and shift it to a carbon tax? And make EVs come in for a "milage check" since they won't have smog checks.
Then everyone pays fairly for road maintenance based on how much they use the roads, and people driving ICE vehicles will pay for the externality of their pollution through their gas consumption.
Not that hard to add a milage check, or just take your word for it. Eventually you'd get caught lying if they make cops write down how many miles you have when they give you a ticket, or when you sell your car.
A solution might be to allow your automobile manufacturer to provide the state authority (who charges for mileage) on a cadence with the data, scoped only to mileage data.
Tesla has the mileage data for all of my vehicles. They could even provide mileage driven data by state. I wouldn’t mind clicking an approve button, and have my credit card charged when needed. This is already how my tolls work (albeit with a transponder instead of vehicle telemetry).
Many people would be wary of any sort of mandatory collection of data like that, by a third party transmitted without their knowledge. Also, fleet turnover is like 10+ years, so it would take a long time before enough cars had that.
Change is a constant. The data is being collected regardless, we’re just haggling over the oversight and governance of the data. Taxes should be collected equitably to be disbursed to where road use takes place.
Those without telemetry can be provided an exception process until fleet turnover is complete.
It shouldn't be being collected. Fleet vehicles may have an excuse, ones sold to non-fleet buyers should not. J
ust because you can chuck some memory, a processor,and an antenna into a car does not mean you have the right to the data stream from that car post-purchase. Especially given the fact that in the U.S., Third Party Doctrine basically negates a Constitutionally guaranteed right. (4th Amendment).
A manufacturer does not have a right to post-sale telemetry. They never did, and the only thing that has given it mainstream acceptance is the public's lack of vosibility and understanding of just what it meant was enabled byadding a few key circuit boards to complex equipment.
I friend of mine had a switch installed on his leased car odometer/speedometer so he could shut it off. He was extremely careful to keep maintenance records consistent with drive time (performing his own oil changes outside normal service). To me the risk would be way too high, but it could be done in the early 2000's. Not sure about today.
Sure, there are people who break the law all the time, and some get caught. But most people are honest and law-abiding most of the time.
To be clear, what your friend did wasn't just unethical, it was straight up illegal. In fact, since it was a leased car, he not only broke the law about illegal vehicle modifications, but he also committed fraud against the leasing company.
Also, doing something like that today would be very hard, because very few cars still have mechanical odometers.
A gas tax happens at the pump. The most logical & fair tax to apply is a surcharge at the charging station. It doesn’t apply for home-chargers tho but a surcharge there could theoretically happen as well (not that I would encourage it)., or the gov could encourage home solar then by removing car charging surcharges for solar home owners
Treat gas cars and electric cars the same. Dump the gas tax, charge a fee that takes into account mileage/vehicle weight.
Even if you should (based on environmental impact or even just road infrastructure impact) tax gas vehicles more. But we know that's not gonna happen here in Texas.
Giving subsidies for buying EVs and then taxing them later doesn't sound that bad actually, it's like a loan. Right now the high sticker price of EVs is a bigger problem than the maintenance cost.
Politicians and lobbyists have managed to conflate gas tax revenue directly with road maintenance funding. The gas tax instead should be seen as an energy dependence tax. Even if there was no possibility of some new energy infrastructure to gas, the revenue should go towards subsidizing energy independence. Finding and creating the best path to achieving energy independence would be incentivised through a discounted future revenue projections of the gas tax and include climate change effects on all industries including road maintenance however minor, along with domestic energy production.
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[ 0.29 ms ] story [ 141 ms ] threadTeslas make up the plurality, and often majority, of electric vehicles sold in the US.
[1] https://www.gao.gov/assets/ced-79-94.pdf
Socialism for me, but not for thee.
https://www.thecentersquare.com/texas/texas-drivers-pay-20-c...
A Texan driver would have to buy 2000 gallons of gas a year to pay $400 in gas taxes to Texas. That seems pretty high when the average Texan drives 16347 miles per year [1]; it implies fuel economy of only 8.2 MPG at average travel distance. Even the big Ford F-450 has better average fuel economy than that.
[1] https://www.caranddriver.com/research/a32880477/average-mile...
Just make this $150/yr, charge $1/gal tax for ICE cars, that should make it about even.
For comparison I pay $1500 yearly road tax and $4/gal in taxes alone at the pump and I find it too cheap to pollute still.
For trucks they already have tachographs which record lots driving parameters but mainly distance, speed, driving time, violations. Gen2 also records GPS coorinates at start and stop so it's harder to defeat. The fleet operators need to keep those records for two years. Penalties for modifying a tachograph are quite high, tens of thousands of euros.
Someone driving a lot in a certain place probably lives already pays property taxes. If they don't register the vehicle there after six months or so it's the police's business to make sure they do.
You see, they don't have to monitor everything very precisely, just 95% or so.
https://www.dr.dk/nyheder/politik/billigere-elbiler-paa-vej-...
Just a back of the envelope estimate:
With Federal gas taxes of 20 cents per gallon and state levies ranging from 20-60 cents, let's say an average of 40 cents for a total of 60 cents a gallon. ~120 Billion gallons of gas are used each year, say 200 million adult drivers means each adult is paying around .6*120B/.2B = $360 per year in gas taxes. $400 seems to be a reasonable ballpark for the gas tax revenue lost per year.
That's not a revenue stream governments are going to be willing to lose, so as EV popularity increases, you can expect more of this. It doesn't seem too awful, TBH. The alternative would be to have a special levy on electricity, similar to what we do with gasoline, but that's going to hit a lot more than PEV drivers, so if we fund roads with use fees, which we currently do, then paying a few hundred bucks a year in lieu of gas taxes seems fair.
This TX bill seems to have a flat fee + another fee based on mileage, which sounds more reasonable.
Back of the napkin for me says it should be about $0.40/gal given the Texas gas tax is $0.20.
Either way, I suspect that even this is too low and Texas is due for an increase in the gas tax by another $0.10-$0.20 in the next few years. This $400 fee will most likely be the EV taxes moving first, in my estimation.
0: https://comptroller.texas.gov/economy/fiscal-notes/2019/jul/...
$400 / $0.384 = 1042 gallons of gasoline in equivalent taxes.
Typical annual mileage per vehicle runs around 12,000 miles. Most cars get much better than the 11.51 mpg implied by the tax.
So Texas EV users are being financially punished for cleaning up the air. Which is very, very much on-brand for Texas. I'm amazed they aren't outlawed.
This point just doesn't hold, sorry.
I mean, fine. Maybe the gas tax is unfair and we should replace it with something more neutral. Or maybe the gas tax should be viewed as a "sin tax" the way taxes on alcohol and cigarettes and tanning are. Maybe it should be higher, if that's the case.
But whatever side you decide to come down on, wanting a steady source of revenue for road maintenance just isn't related.
In this case, the Texas legislature clearly wants to stick it to the dirty fucking hippies. Their roads are fine and they know it.
(That said, if Texas were to institute a new tax on electrical generation to better regulate its disastrous distribution network, maybe there would be an argument...)
I agree it's motivated by a sort of hyper conservatism; all change is bad and needs to be resisted.
Meanwhile California has down payment and buy back programs for low income people to replace their cars with hybrids and ev's.
That's clearly a less than great outcome that could be remedied through taxation and regulation, but not if you start at taxing EVs.
This is very tricky because roads have so many positive externalities. Even if you live in a walkable neighborhood and don't own a car, you will walk to stores that have goods delivered to them by truck, right to your neighborhood, so you can walk up and buy them. Without all those trucks bringing things close to where you live, you wouldn't have that convenience and would need to get a car yourself. Probably a heavy car since you'd have to haul everything yourself -- everyone would need to drive right up to the factory gate and then transport it back for every good you buy. Imagine what that would do to the road quality! So trucks help use the road more efficiently and actually save the road relative the alternative of not having dedicated trucking.
And not only that, but that fact means local stores are in competition with stores farther away, which drives down prices. So even people who never drive obtain many valuable benefits from the roads that connect their neighborhood to other neighborhoods, and many of these benefits are delivered, so to speak, by trucks. Thus everyone pays for these benefits.
This idea that once there is a road connecting two markets, that prices begin to equalize in them was one of the things observed by Adam Smith when he talked about how local shopkeepers often opposed roads connecting their town to towns with larger markets (and cheaper goods). Now they don't equalize perfectly, they equalize up to transportation costs. Thus lowering transportation costs for the trucks that ship goods between markets results in lower prices for everyone who buys those goods, even if they don't use the road themselves. This is why it makes sense to subsidize the transportation of goods.
Thus our current system makes sense, roads are paid in part from general funds, in part from use fees, and there are some extra fees added to trucks.
I certainly can't concur with a plain "thus our current systems makes sense". I'm sure you have noticed most Americans own large cars regardless.
Subsidise ecological transport, not diesel fumes blown to my face when I walk to my market to buy local produce, not hauled from across continent (I don't really care, but know people who do and they don't seem to sacrifice ton of their life quality by living waste-free).
Is that right?
The US average looks like 25 mpg and 14,000 miles driven, 560 gallons: $112 or with federal taxes $215.
Unfortunately too many proposals want to overcharge and or use Orwellian gps surveillance to determine something simple like mileage.
https://www.tmz.com/2021/03/27/pete-buttigieg-biden-administ...
Works even with larger vehicles as they have more tires.
While I question the intelligence and timing of taxing cars... taxing tires would stop people from replacing tires more than any other rising cost, how?
I also question whether they would "remove" the gas tax... I also question why people wouldn't cross state lines to save money (depending on tax and/or distances - same as nearby where Delaware has no sales tax but the business taxes are higher so it kinda balances out).
It's not a direct correlation, but there appears to be a cliff when people stop driving as much or exchange high consumption vehicles for lower consumption. You can see this effect when gas taxes go up in various states, and also comparing Europe to the USA.
> taxing cigarettes' doesn't stop people from smoking.
It very much does. Every time a state increases their tobacco tax, smoking rates go down.
My preference would be weight-weighted VMT, but that’s a complex solution to implement and manage. And dump truck owners will have a fit.
http://archive.gao.gov/f0302/109884.pdf
That's generally how it does work. I mean, yeah, when you hit a certain point, you might forego a bit of profitability a little here and there, but if you can't even get the stuff where it needs to be to do good for less than $X when it used to be $Y where Y<X for less than your overhead + outlay, you have to bump your price ask up to reflect the market reality.
It feels like it shouldn't be that way, but a surprisingly large amount of what makes the modern world work is proxying and physical caching as a business model.
The best place to figure out the fee should be the annual inspection. Plug into the computer, check the mileage, and calculate how many miles were driven since the last inspection. Put it into a calculator, and send out the fee.
Most of the road wear is from trucks, anyway. And I mean big rigs, not an F-150.
When you register your car, you have to say how many miles you drove, and it gets verified every few years with smog checks.
Why not just charge a per mile-ton fee? Maybe give freight trucks a break so we don't kill shipping, or only charge them for their empty weight? Have some of the fee go to the state and some go federally for redistribution (like gas taxes work now).
Then eliminate the gas tax as a source of funding for road maintenance and shift it to a carbon tax? And make EVs come in for a "milage check" since they won't have smog checks.
Then everyone pays fairly for road maintenance based on how much they use the roads, and people driving ICE vehicles will pay for the externality of their pollution through their gas consumption.
So some other mechanism would be required.
Tesla has the mileage data for all of my vehicles. They could even provide mileage driven data by state. I wouldn’t mind clicking an approve button, and have my credit card charged when needed. This is already how my tolls work (albeit with a transponder instead of vehicle telemetry).
Those without telemetry can be provided an exception process until fleet turnover is complete.
A manufacturer does not have a right to post-sale telemetry. They never did, and the only thing that has given it mainstream acceptance is the public's lack of vosibility and understanding of just what it meant was enabled byadding a few key circuit boards to complex equipment.
To be clear, what your friend did wasn't just unethical, it was straight up illegal. In fact, since it was a leased car, he not only broke the law about illegal vehicle modifications, but he also committed fraud against the leasing company.
Also, doing something like that today would be very hard, because very few cars still have mechanical odometers.
Even if you should (based on environmental impact or even just road infrastructure impact) tax gas vehicles more. But we know that's not gonna happen here in Texas.