Without reasonable alternative such as frequent and reliable public transit or major support for electric vehicle adoption, this will hurt most Californians much more than it helps.
While I don't claim to be an expert on policy, perhaps a $0.65/gal tax which funds public transit would be a better use of this increase in cost.
~20% of all vehicles sold in California are already electric, and generous state subsidies exist on top of federal subsidies. Some states will arrive at a majority EV future sooner than others.
Those are great, and I'm all in favor to alternatives to gasoline, but most people aren't buying new cars these days. In fact, the age of the average car in the US is at all time highs. These subsidies aren't moving the needle enough. The reality is that most people will simply be forced to pay more for their commute.
This is the government using the stick when they should try and use the carrot.
People are still buying new and used vehicles (as it is unavoidable if you cannot rely on public transportation), and with a mixture of policy, they will be encouraged to buy EVs.
> This is the government using the stick when they should try and use the carrot.
You can provide as much carrots as you want and people will still say it's not enough. Everyone wants to freeload, no one wants to pay the true cost of burning fossil fuels for transportation (which would be >$10/gallon if you bake CO2 emission and health costs in).
> Everyone wants to freeload, no one wants to pay the true cost of burning fossil fuels for transportation (which would be >$10/gallon if you bake CO2 emission and health costs in).
If we want to talk about externalities in a balanced way, we can’t pick and choose. You can’t just recognize CO2 from burning gas or specific health issues, because that is the same as artificially picking what you want to allow and not allow. You have to also price in the externalities and opportunity costs of the alternative. In the case of electric vehicles, it is everything from raw materials (mining), to the reduced quality of life due to limited range of EVs, to child labor in the supply chain, to the geopolitical implications of using certain battery suppliers like CATL, to pollution (not just greenhouse gases from car production or electrical utilities but other environmental pollutants as well), to increased tire wear from heavier vehicles, and more. Maybe no on wants to pay the true cost of fossil fuels but no one wants to even talk about the true cost of EVs let alone pay it. I don’t know which is “better” but I suspect the math will be more complicated and not support heavyweight taxation.
Whatever the case we do not want to run out of accessible oil and fuck up the climate because that little detour would end modern civilization and prevent it for as long as new oil forms at scale (on the order of 10^8 years). Calculate the cost of that. Oil is incredibly precious.
>Everyone wants to freeload, no one wants to pay the true cost of burning fossil fuels for transportation
I was ready to buy an FEV this year. Instead, my company laid me off to get record profits, my state and country gaslit me to belive unemployment is low and the economy is great (while also taking about mysterious headwinds. Almost like we're heading towards a recession...) , and the job market went from an annoying but reasonable hoop to a whole-ass circus.
I've been getting spanked all year and people are asking me why I'm destroying the environment with my 2008 Sedan? Clearly no one wants me to even afford rent at this point.
I think about this the other way around. The federal government and other states have artificially low gas taxes that are a direct subsidy of gasoline car dependence. A state like California imposing a tax like this makes them one of the few states that's actually aware how much the consumption of a gallon of gas costs society and manages to charge someone for it.
- The federal gas tax has been 18.4 cents per gallon since 1993, and has not increased to account for inflation
- Vehicles are more fuel efficient than in the past, which has reduced the demand for gas by the gallon on an individual basis.
- The cost of infrastructure materials has increased (e.g., building new roads and bridges)
There is a very decent argument to be had that nobody is actually paying the societal cost of driving, that all of society just loses value by driving. In other words, each mile you drive in your car incurs costs on the rest of society that nobody directly pays, and therefore everyone pays.
A sudden $.65/gal increase seems steep. There are, however, a lot of negative externalities—probably much greater than $.65/gal—from gasoline that aren’t baked into current prices. Other posts here reference significant savings from longterm health improvements.
I’m all for public transit and California needs more of it. At the same time, gas is really bad and so perhaps deserves a stick, just like cigarettes?
CA also has the highest real poverty rate in the country (SPM)
I think GP's point about funding public transit is reasonable - a huge chunk of Californians can't afford an EV right now given that the cheapest one on the market is like a good $10k more expensive than the cheapest gas sedans.
It seems to me that EVs depreciate so much faster than gasoline cars that they're almost always cheaper with lower miles than an equivalent gasoline car. The only strong exception seems to be the Tesla Model Y.
Anyway, I agree that California especially needs to greatly expand public transit. But I think it's notable that at this point cost isn't really a major negative to EV ownership.
Its max advertised range. In reality it will likely be smaller depending on driving habits/weather/ac, it is hard to charge EV battery to 100% if you on the move, you don't want charge to drop to 0% obviously, so you will be charging sooner.
I do not own EV, but people have range anxiety on reddit.
You never need to nor should you charge above 80% on an EV unless you have a driving situation where you absolutely need that range to hit the next charging station.
It's faster to just charge multiple times rather than spend time charging above 80%.
My theory is people who don't have EVs have range anxiety.
Sometimes it seems like people forget just how far 100+ miles is.
Okay, sure, an EV with 230 miles of ideal range is really more like 150-180 miles given that you're not charging up past 80% regularly and given not-always-ideal conditions.
But that's a lot of miles. That could be 3 straight hours of highway driving.
I know for me, personally, with my gasoline car I can count on one hand the number of times I've driven more than 3 hours in one day in the past year.
I think 100 miles/d could be quite common commute in some places in US (50 mins driving one way on highway withing speed limit).
Also, range anxiety is mostly for those who is taking road trips, not for everyday commute.
And there are other factors: model3 is 10k more expensive than civic hybrid, electricity cost in California (as example from references on car prices above) is over the top.
My point is, a used model 3 or similar EV depreciates a lot faster than a civic hybrid, so a typical 3 year old off-lease buyer will find that both of those cars cost about the same amount of money.
And sure electricity cost in California is through the roof but so is gasoline right? It’s a full dollar and a half per gallon higher than Texas according to GasBuddy.
Let’s not forget about overnight off-peak EV rates that are half or less than the day rates.
And then you get other benefits to EV ownership like a reduced maintenance schedule, no oil changes, if you have charging at home you never go to a gas station again unless you’re on a long trip. Saves you time.
Sorry, I somehow missed the point about used M3, I agree, this could be a good deal.
> And sure electricity cost in California is through the roof but so is gasoline right?
Gasoline maybe more expensive by 30%, but electricity N times. Last time I plugged numbers in some calculator, it was more expensive to charge Tesla on supercharger. If you have house with solar roof, or can charge off-peak, numbers could be different.
I’m not sure what that has to do with this discussion, though.
Someone who can’t afford a car at all and takes the bus isn’t affected by gas prices, and raising/lowering gas prices won’t help them afford a car significantly more easily.
Gasoline is essentially the smallest cost related to vehicle ownership.
It’s important to think of this in relative terms. For some peopl, $0.65/gal is a 25% increase (or more). For California, it’s 15% (or less). Still notable, but not as dramatic as it sounds to some.
Why not raise the price in urban areas, where pollution is greater, as is the standard of living? Then throw in some more public transportation to make up for the difference. The lone white boy chugging gas in rural California and living paycheck to paycheck can probably take a break, and his emissions, I suppose, are largely irrelevant.
Because you can't target price increases due to refinery specifications around fuel composition. You can only encourage EV uptake (policies and subsidies) and destroy fossil fuel demand (impair the fossil fuel supply chain).
You mean the area where most of the ones at or slightly above the poverty line is? Why not just re-distribute more fentanyl while we're at it? It'll have the same effect.
> this will hurt most Californians much more than it helps
I think you're vastly underestimating the positive externalities of high gas prices.
It's annoying that this disproportionately hurts poorer residents but so do cars. Cars are just very very bad for society, while I think in an ideal world we would make public transit so good that it wouldn't make sense to own a car, going about it by making car ownership non-viable so that we're forced to invest more in public transit is also workable. At least this hits you a lot harder if you drive an SUV/truck.
We should also do an odometer x weight based tax to adequately punish electric car owners.
People over estimate the contribution of gas taxes to total cost of ownership and under estimate all the others. That was my take away for the decade I was sick and broke and had to deal hard with my finances.
I'm aware, I've lived all around California for the last 25 years, the vast majority of those years without owning a car and yet I managed to get around via bus/train/bike okay, and not just in metropolitan areas.
That aside, I'm curious about this point in response to my tax suggestion.
> California wants to be mostly FEV by 2045. That's a horrible idea unless you care more about road construction than the environment.
I'm not sure I follow how that shakes out, can you elaborate?
Worst NYC subway ride ever included a brown cylindrical object rolling three feet across the floor whenever the train started or stopped. And the riders acted like this was just another Tuesday.
But those riders had no other options. In CA the better option is right there in front of your house, with highways crisscrossing every which way to get you on your way.
The first and only time I rode on Atlanta's MARTA I got to the airport and thought "ok this wasn't that bad", as I get up, turned around and see a homeless man passed out in his urine puddle running down the car.
This is not "public transit", it's public toilet, public unsupervised mental health shelter.
The vast majority of Californians live in areas unsuitable for public transit. Unless you plan on leveling and rebuilding California cities first, expecting people to use public transit in California is not realistic.
Cities are suitable for public transport and that’s where most californians live. Yes, they shoud rebuild their cities, it’s called development and is done all the time.
I am talking about the cities. Cities are not intrinsically suitable for public transportation. In the case of California, extreme sprawl and low-density guarantees that public transportation will be unusable. Almost none of it was designed to allow public transportation to be feasible, no amount of wishful thinking will change that.
I've lived in every major metro in California. There is no chance that public transportation will be viable for most people in those cities in my lifetime.
There is something like 50-60 metros in the US with more than 1 million people. By your definition only a few of these are "cities". Either way, the point still stands that they are largely unsuitable for a functional bus system.
You give government right of first refusal on any low density property for sale in california, you get rid of sfh zoning, re-zone anything within 1Km of public transport as high density, and then build mid-rise high density buildings everywhere as you massively expand public transport network.
Within a decade you could have dense efficient cities all over california.
So you think your plan is going to work in, say, Alpine county, CA, with its 1.6 people per square mile? Its largest city has 163 people in it.
How is a high-density mid-rise apartment building going to help the people there? Do they really need a train or bus system there? How are you going to make their community better by getting rid of SFHs?
California is a big place, and a lot of it is very, VERY rural. There's no one-size-fits-all fix. San Francisco solutions aren't going to work in rural CA.
Politicians and bureaucracies refuse to build up the nuclear power plants and power distribution infrastructure required to get California drivers off gasoline. I’m just concerned about all the tracking in new electric cars. Hopefully we can build up electric car infrastructure soon and “jailbreak” electric cars with nauseating telemetry. I’m also interested to see data that would correlate increasing gas prices, CoL increases and inflation with a rise in property crime. We don’t need to make gasoline cleaner, we need to make cheaper electric cars and more numerous charging stations.
You're going to need an actual maintenance infrastructure which is currently lacking. You're also going to need to improve the roads themselves due to the additional weight of the vehicles. You need a massive rollout of charging stations.
If it were only the lack of nuclear plants.
You can't just wave your hands about the climate and then hope to create a new market overnight.
Passenger vehicle weight is basically irrelevant. Damage is proportional to the 4th power, so if your road can carry a much heavier vehicle, the passenger vehicle isn't really doing any damage.
Not all roads are created equally or have equal weight ratings. I'm sure you've seen signs depicting restrictions on certain roads. These smaller roads tend to be owned and maintained by smaller municipalities who are less able to afford upgrades or maintenance.
In any case, point still stands, you're more than "one smart decision" away from having electrified the American fleet of vehicles.
I also wonder what happened to some of the experiments California has already ran. For example the eHighway idea (https://insideevs.com/news/336589/first-us-ehighway-launched...), to let semi trucks draw power from overhead lines (like a train). To me it seems like a no brainer to give larger vehicles this option. Buses already operate this way in many cities. Why not put overhead lines on all carpool lanes and let semi trucks use them? It might even make a big enough impact on greenhouse gas emissions that we don’t need to have contentious arguments about banning gas cars or raising gas taxes. But like many good ideas, it came and went without anything more coming of it as far as I know.
High capital cost with a long delay before it starts paying back. Worse the capital cost of overhead lines is higher than batteries.
What's happened to a lot of alternative ideas is they no longer pencil out because solar and batteries have gotten so cheap. Like solar thermal, doesn't pencil out. Wind and solar, plus batteries is cheaper than coal.
> Worse the capital cost of overhead lines is higher than batteries.
Is that really true? My understanding is that the bus systems that use overheads lines do so because it is overall cheaper. And it won’t have the negative issues of batteries (mining, recycling, geopolitics). Yes there is cost to equipping vehicles but it is a small number of larger vehicles which might make the problem easier. I would think the cost of the actual overhead lines is low (it is usually a small part of the costs for building rail for example).
What amazes me is that none of the stories I have read address the decrease in health costs these changes will bring. “An EPA analysis showed that the Clean Air Act’s benefits outweigh its costs by a factor of 30.” [0] Nor has any one talked about how this will drive adoptions of other transportation methods including public transportation. If we fully baked in the actual costs, health and environmental, I suspect gasoline would cost much, much more.
How far does this go? Should we charge taxes on sugar due to health care costs? What about taxes on fiber due to increase wear on sewers?
Go to electric. What about the environmental impact on battery creation/recycling/maintenance? Or the electricity to power them (until nuclear comes online)?
This line of argumentation can go on endlessly. How about instead let’s reduce taxes and try focusing on lowering the cost of living for middle and lower income brackets.
Sugar tax doesn't work well. The fiber thing sounds like a joke? Pollution from producing electricity sounds like a great thing to tax. What makes you treat that as an idea so obviously bad you don't need to say why? And the impact of manufacturing already is addressed in a lot of ways, even if it could be better.
Sounds like utopic thinking seeking an unattainable perfection.
What happens when taxes are so high, we have an egress of businesses from regions within the US causing collapse of local communities like saw with Detroit?
I'm in general against using the reductio ad absurdism to suggest we can't do something positive because there is an absurd inevitable point at which it stops being positive.
The point is, when navigating a highly dimensional design space it's ok to use a gradient descent / greedy optimization approach. If step 1 works then proceed to step 2, if step 1 did not work then we learned something and can pick a different step. Fix whatever went wrong in making the mistake with picking step 1 as the current top priority. It makes no sense to say that we can't make step 1 because step 1001 might be bad.
On the point of taxation, I personally dislike tax precisely because I think the money is not allocated in anything close to priority order. If it was we would be living in a vastly different world.
>Sounds like utopic thinking seeking an unattainable perfection.
Like you just magically saying "let's cut taxes and reduce cost of living"?
>we have an egress of businesses from regions within the US causing collapse of local communities like saw with Detroit?
If all you're worried about is big business, don't worry. They already leaving. Communities are already collapsing. And we voted for it, so hey. Democracy works right?
Many countries introduce taxes on sugary drinks and snacks with varying outcomes[0]. These type of things only go endlessly if you have all or nothing thinking and taxes like this are meant to shape behavior so unless you want people shitting less then no you don't need to tax fiber.
My concern is the behavior shaping is not a simple, single variable equation. Many times these policies have knock on effects that produce a worse outcome for those struggling.
We have data on this in the form of cigarette taxes that show good outcomes in preventing people from starting smoking and bad outcomes for existing smokers since they don't quit due to increased prices and just keep smoking while paying more so that this could go either way. So I understand your concern. I just take issue with the reasoning "this can go on endlessly!"
Reducing taxes should push for local and federal governments to become more efficient and waste less.
We’re at an incredible deficit as a nation, interest alone on that deficit outpacing defense spending.
Creating additional taxes, which will potentially slow growth/gdp, will only harm our efforts to resolve our woeful financial situation as a nation. Additional taxes further pushes business out of the country, leading to a spiral to insolvency.
Californian’s should be asking, where do these taxes go? Not to solving homelessness or violent crime. Not to resolving catastrophic water issues (reservoirs drying up), or fixing brownouts across the region.
Felonies are down in California, year over year, for the past decade. Reservioirs are above historical averages. Homelessness is a problem, but people freak out when you address real solutions, like minimum wage changes. Brownouts and blackouts are far less likely than they were a decade or two ago. Thanks to green tech like solar panels and batteries.
Thanks to Enron being stopped from causing artificial blackouts by creating electrical supply constraints through shutting off power plants. And they could profit from it by purchasing contracts that made money if electricity costs went higher. Then sold those off before they then told them to turn the power plants back on. Cost California billions. See “Enron, the smartest guys in the room”
Balance sheet accounting vs total cost to society when extenalities are included is a huge source of problems.
A good to know is California has some programs where they will buy back your older vehicle and pay you a grant of you replace it with a new or used low emissions vehicle. You can also get public transit vouchers instead I think.
Note. Low emissions includes hybrids. And some used EV's are really affordable.
It's a very similar story, actually: as China industrialized, it has very similarly realized that curtailing air pollution is an extremely important issue with benefits that outweigh costs.
It has continually tightened standards and its overall air quality is improving (although it still has notable areas where more improvement is needed)
Exactly. The USA brags about its environmental improvements but fails to mention it exported plenty of manufacturing to do that. Come the summer when the media highlights the smog over Beijing, The West ownes a good chunk of that violation of Mother Nature.
China, etc is cheaper not only because of the cost of labor but because of lack of environmental protections.
We know now that while these laws have local impacts they clearly also have global impacts and they are not always positive.
Attempting to use the local success of the EPA Clean Air Act to justify a flat 16%+ increase in the price of a widely used and important commodity is inappropriate.
>Nor has any one talked about how this will drive adoptions of other transportation methods including public transportation
How is the high speed rail in California going? Asking for a friend. Is California able to build public transport fast? To make it safe? Is is able to keep the vagrants, homeless, smelly, and crazy away so to make it palatable for the good standing citizens to use them?
This doesn't sit right with me. If the goal is to reduce gasoline use by 2045, why is California also absolutely gouging people with the highest electricity cost in the country?
Incompetence is usually not intentional. For example Germany has shut down the nuclear power plants because it was important for the Greens. Instead they burn more coal now.
This is true, but Germany is quickly ramping up renewables. Recent figures show that wind and solar accounted for more than 50% of energy this summer. Winter will likely be a challenge though.
If we're blue skying ideals, I'd like some heavy rent control, to do away with ghost jobs and limit the time needed to interview a single candidate, remove paid lunch plans in public school system, regulate dating site algorithms, and offer an actually working rehabilitation clinic.
California is a case study in gross over payment in utilities. From Enron, to eye-watering costs for nuclear plants, costs for fires caused by utility wire windfall, ... How about a sentence like "PG&E can decommission Diablo Canyon for $4 billion, $12 billion to keep the plant running until 2030, or $45 billion to improve and extend the life of the plant." Vast sums have been lost, both ratepayers and investors. That's one plant for one utility. There are six investor-owned utilities in California. Most states swapped coal out for natural gas, or installed wind power. https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2024-08-25/should-...
California needs to just fully invest in nuclear. And regulate or use eminent domain to buy PG&E to socialize it. Costs would go down, executive pay would go down, reliability and issues related to forest fires would likely go down.
And they need to invest in better public transit. Imagine LA with SF-level public transit. Or SF with NYC-level public transit (or better).
LA county and the adjoining counties are roughly the same size as the Kanto Plain around Tokyo. The main difference is that Tokyo rebuilt their street car lines as heavy rail instead of turning them into automobile arterials.
And Tokyo does have highways and large streets, they just aren't in constant gridlock because people have other options (not to mention many other factors at play in Japanese car-ownership).
Tokyo was so relaxing. Greater Tokyo has the same population as the entire state of CA and yet was so quiet.
There is no gouging. Climate change and other factors have caused California to turn into a hellacious inferno in the summers due to wildfires. In response, they are burying a very large number of power lines, because they spark them. This cost is causing rates to spike, but in return, hopefully less apocalyptic summers.
What does cost structure look like? I'm sure wholesale power price is pretty similar in entire US. Californians are gouged by the distribution company, likely because overall labour cost in California.
When I look at the rhetoric supporting increases to gas prices in California or Washington through creative means like fuel standards or selectively applied carbon taxes, I can’t help but think about how ideologically driven all of it is. The language used by proponents is often so hostile and absolutist, like discussion is possible, like they know better. It reeks of elitism, because spending on gas is not an option for most people. It’s simply how many people get around every single day. Sure if you are a young, single, urban worker you may get by on public transit. But others have different needs that are better served by cars - if you have a family or hobbies that take you away from transit lines or simply short on time, a car is better in most parts of the country. Imposing a tax on how people live is not just a regressive tax but it will also cause those people to despise you.
It’s a good question but I don’t have a good answer. I’d be curious how you reason about it though, if you have a good framework on this topic. I think I already pay for smokers indirectly to some extent since insurance pools risk. And the ACA (Obamacare) outlawed denial of coverage for pre existing conditions except for older plans. So we’re already in this situation.
Am I OK with it? Not really. But I think we need to figure out what the general principled way of thinking about this is. People make all sorts of choices that are good and bad for their health. We could ask the same question about those who are overweight due to overeating, or those who want cosmetic surgery relating to a gender transition, or those who get injured due to an extreme sport, or whatever. Should we pick and choose who to subsidize?
The fact that people live like that was a policy choice too. Entire neighborhoods were disrupted to make way for this way of life. It was easy back then because we chose marginalized and poor people to displace. Seems only fair to "do it right" this time and subsidize relocation costs for everyone so our society can be organized based on efficiency and access to amenities. Edge cases will probably still require cars, but we can optimize access to common activities.
Washington just voted on an initiative to repeal the state's cap and trade law on CO2 and it was soundly rejected by voters 61.7% to 38.3%.
The proponents of the initiative heavily focused on saying repeal would lower the price of gas. The opponents focused on how much money cap and trade raised and what it was being used for (transportation infrastructure, clean air and water projects, wildfire prevention, for example).
I think voters recognized that the things the money is being used for are things that have to be addressed and they would rather the money come from something that at least somewhat correlates with those issues than from some more general revenue source like property taxes or sales taxes.
We really need more affordable electric cars in Washington. We've got high gas prices (and still would have high gas prices even if the initiative had passed [1]), and low electricity prices.
Yes, I know many people need more range, or do not have a good place to charge cheaply or conveniently. But there are a lot of people who are fine with the range, or who have multiple cars and could make one be an EV to cover all the shorter range driving, and who do have a cheap convenient way to charge.
In my area (western Washington but not in Seattle) the electric utility (PSE) is doing a trial of time of usage (TOU) rates. They are trying out three plans, one specifically for EV owners. It is a two year trial just entering the second year. From what I've read it seems likely they will continue after the trial--the trial is more to work out kinks rather than to decided if they want to offer TOU.
Normal marginal rates here are about $0.12/kWh. On the TOU rate I'm on they are $0.08/kWh off-peak and $0.19/kWh summer peak and $0.33/kWh winter peak. Summer is Apr-Sep and peak isc 5-8 pm M-F. Winter is Oct-Mar and peak is 5-8 pm M-F and 7-10 am M-F.
On the TOU plan for EV households, off-peak is around $.09/kWh, summer peak around $0.17/kWh, and winter peak around $0.31/kWh, but they also add "super off-peak" which is 11 pm to 7 am every day and is around $0.05/kWh.
If you could get gas for the current national average price of a little over $3/gallon you would need to use it in an ICE car that gets over 240 mpg for it to be cheaper than the cost to charge an EV on the EV TOU plan if you do all your charging during super off-peak. (For people not on any TOU plan they save with an EV if their ICE doesn't get over 100 mpg).
I've read that there is supposed to be a big increase in the availability of used EVs around 2026, due to a big increase in EV leases in 2023. Most leases are 3 year leases, and many of those will be available as used EVs when the leases are up.
[1] Gas prices vary a lot from state to state even between states that have the same taxes and fees. A big part of that is different transportation costs. How far you are from refineries and from pipelines and ports makes a big difference.
Addendum: some people might be curious about how it is with a time of usage rate as described above, so I'll give a short description of what it has been like for me after one year on it.
When invited to the trial I went over my past bills and calculated my potential savings. You can download PSE usage data that covers usage over 15-minute intervals so it was easy to write a program to look at my past bills and tell me (1) what they would have been if I had been under TOU but made no changes to usage, and (2) what they would have done if I could have moved any given percentage of my peak usage to off-peak.
That showed I'd save about 1% with no usage changes. If I could shift all my peak to off-peak I'd save about 30%.
Here's what I did to reduce peak usage.
• Turn off heating during peak.
• Turn water heater thermostat to the "vacation" setting during peak.
• Move things I use hot water for to non-peak. Most of my hot water use is laundry, dishwashing, and bathing. For laundry I moved laundry day from Friday to Saturday. For dishwashing if I need to use the dishwasher on a weekday I time it for non-peak. I didn't need to change bathing because that is in the morning, and even if it happens to be during morning peak it will be my first hot water use of the day. My water heater is well enough insulated that it can handle that fine.
• The move of laundry to Saturday took care of my biggest non-water heating appliance: the electric clothes dryer.
• I try to avoid using the oven during peak. Not a big deal because the main thing I use the oven for is bake-at-home pizza and I don't do that often.
Here are some things I did not change.
• Microwave and George Foreman grill. At first I did, but then put the grill on a Kill-a-Watt and found out that the difference between peak and off-peak in winter over the course of cooking a burger or a grilled cheese sandwich was something like $0.02.
In the year before TOU, 17.6% of my usage was during peak hours. In the first year of TOU it was 5.1%. That works out to a savings of $190. That's somewhere in the 15-20% savings range.
I literally cannot live in Los Angeles because of the constant smog. Yes, it's much better than it was, but Los Angeles is still in a bowl, and it's bad enough that I cannot live there.
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[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 200 ms ] threadWhile I don't claim to be an expert on policy, perhaps a $0.65/gal tax which funds public transit would be a better use of this increase in cost.
https://www.veloz.org/ev-market-report/
https://driveclean.ca.gov/search-incentives
This is the government using the stick when they should try and use the carrot.
> This is the government using the stick when they should try and use the carrot.
You can provide as much carrots as you want and people will still say it's not enough. Everyone wants to freeload, no one wants to pay the true cost of burning fossil fuels for transportation (which would be >$10/gallon if you bake CO2 emission and health costs in).
If we want to talk about externalities in a balanced way, we can’t pick and choose. You can’t just recognize CO2 from burning gas or specific health issues, because that is the same as artificially picking what you want to allow and not allow. You have to also price in the externalities and opportunity costs of the alternative. In the case of electric vehicles, it is everything from raw materials (mining), to the reduced quality of life due to limited range of EVs, to child labor in the supply chain, to the geopolitical implications of using certain battery suppliers like CATL, to pollution (not just greenhouse gases from car production or electrical utilities but other environmental pollutants as well), to increased tire wear from heavier vehicles, and more. Maybe no on wants to pay the true cost of fossil fuels but no one wants to even talk about the true cost of EVs let alone pay it. I don’t know which is “better” but I suspect the math will be more complicated and not support heavyweight taxation.
I was ready to buy an FEV this year. Instead, my company laid me off to get record profits, my state and country gaslit me to belive unemployment is low and the economy is great (while also taking about mysterious headwinds. Almost like we're heading towards a recession...) , and the job market went from an annoying but reasonable hoop to a whole-ass circus.
I've been getting spanked all year and people are asking me why I'm destroying the environment with my 2008 Sedan? Clearly no one wants me to even afford rent at this point.
- The federal gas tax has been 18.4 cents per gallon since 1993, and has not increased to account for inflation
- Vehicles are more fuel efficient than in the past, which has reduced the demand for gas by the gallon on an individual basis.
- The cost of infrastructure materials has increased (e.g., building new roads and bridges)
There is a very decent argument to be had that nobody is actually paying the societal cost of driving, that all of society just loses value by driving. In other words, each mile you drive in your car incurs costs on the rest of society that nobody directly pays, and therefore everyone pays.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qp75-46PnMY
I’m all for public transit and California needs more of it. At the same time, gas is really bad and so perhaps deserves a stick, just like cigarettes?
I think GP's point about funding public transit is reasonable - a huge chunk of Californians can't afford an EV right now given that the cheapest one on the market is like a good $10k more expensive than the cheapest gas sedans.
2023 Chevy Bolt EV, 37,000 miles, $15,600 in LA.
Or, a 2020 with 27,000 miles for $13,500.
2021 Tesla Model 3, 24,000 miles, $22,000
2022 Kia Niro EV, 21,000 miles, $18,400
2020 Tesla Model Y, 48,000 miles, $26,800
Gasoline cars to compare:
2020 Toyota Corolla, 66,000 miles, $17,800
2020 Honda CR-V, 44,000 miles, $23,800
2021 Nissan Sentra, 41,000 miles, $16,500
It seems to me that EVs depreciate so much faster than gasoline cars that they're almost always cheaper with lower miles than an equivalent gasoline car. The only strong exception seems to be the Tesla Model Y.
Anyway, I agree that California especially needs to greatly expand public transit. But I think it's notable that at this point cost isn't really a major negative to EV ownership.
I think those older EVs have short impractical range, that's why they are cheap?
I do not own EV, but people have range anxiety on reddit.
yes, but it will charge fast up to 80%, and will charge slow after that, so it is question of how much time you waste.
It's faster to just charge multiple times rather than spend time charging above 80%.
Yes, I think range concerns are mostly about long road trips.
Sometimes it seems like people forget just how far 100+ miles is.
Okay, sure, an EV with 230 miles of ideal range is really more like 150-180 miles given that you're not charging up past 80% regularly and given not-always-ideal conditions.
But that's a lot of miles. That could be 3 straight hours of highway driving.
I know for me, personally, with my gasoline car I can count on one hand the number of times I've driven more than 3 hours in one day in the past year.
Also, range anxiety is mostly for those who is taking road trips, not for everyday commute. And there are other factors: model3 is 10k more expensive than civic hybrid, electricity cost in California (as example from references on car prices above) is over the top.
And sure electricity cost in California is through the roof but so is gasoline right? It’s a full dollar and a half per gallon higher than Texas according to GasBuddy.
Let’s not forget about overnight off-peak EV rates that are half or less than the day rates.
And then you get other benefits to EV ownership like a reduced maintenance schedule, no oil changes, if you have charging at home you never go to a gas station again unless you’re on a long trip. Saves you time.
> And sure electricity cost in California is through the roof but so is gasoline right?
Gasoline maybe more expensive by 30%, but electricity N times. Last time I plugged numbers in some calculator, it was more expensive to charge Tesla on supercharger. If you have house with solar roof, or can charge off-peak, numbers could be different.
Someone who can’t afford a car at all and takes the bus isn’t affected by gas prices, and raising/lowering gas prices won’t help them afford a car significantly more easily.
Gasoline is essentially the smallest cost related to vehicle ownership.
I don't see much/any state subsidies in your link. I think they are all canceled.
Why not raise the price in urban areas, where pollution is greater, as is the standard of living? Then throw in some more public transportation to make up for the difference. The lone white boy chugging gas in rural California and living paycheck to paycheck can probably take a break, and his emissions, I suppose, are largely irrelevant.
I think you're vastly underestimating the positive externalities of high gas prices.
It's annoying that this disproportionately hurts poorer residents but so do cars. Cars are just very very bad for society, while I think in an ideal world we would make public transit so good that it wouldn't make sense to own a car, going about it by making car ownership non-viable so that we're forced to invest more in public transit is also workable. At least this hits you a lot harder if you drive an SUV/truck.
We should also do an odometer x weight based tax to adequately punish electric car owners.
1. Larger than almost all EU countries
2. a lot of farmland
3. Have higher salaries (so bigger budgets)
4. Is extremely mountainous, more so than most US states.
There's a reason it's a multi- decade long initiative just to make a high speed railroad and it's not just the politics of manging all that land.
>We should also do an odometer x weight based tax to adequately punish electric car owners.
California wants to be mostly FEV by 2045. That's a horrible idea unless you care more about road construction than the environment.
And spoilers: we can build more robust roads. We don't becsuse the peope judged it cheaper to repave pavement than take that extra effort.
That aside, I'm curious about this point in response to my tax suggestion.
> California wants to be mostly FEV by 2045. That's a horrible idea unless you care more about road construction than the environment.
I'm not sure I follow how that shakes out, can you elaborate?
But those riders had no other options. In CA the better option is right there in front of your house, with highways crisscrossing every which way to get you on your way.
This is not "public transit", it's public toilet, public unsupervised mental health shelter.
There already is major support. Even Republicans in California (different agenda than republicans in national politics) support it.
I've lived in every major metro in California. There is no chance that public transportation will be viable for most people in those cities in my lifetime.
If it's not dense enough to support city services like a functional bus system, that's just suburban sprawl or maybe a town.
You give government right of first refusal on any low density property for sale in california, you get rid of sfh zoning, re-zone anything within 1Km of public transport as high density, and then build mid-rise high density buildings everywhere as you massively expand public transport network.
Within a decade you could have dense efficient cities all over california.
So you think your plan is going to work in, say, Alpine county, CA, with its 1.6 people per square mile? Its largest city has 163 people in it.
How is a high-density mid-rise apartment building going to help the people there? Do they really need a train or bus system there? How are you going to make their community better by getting rid of SFHs?
California is a big place, and a lot of it is very, VERY rural. There's no one-size-fits-all fix. San Francisco solutions aren't going to work in rural CA.
https://calmatters.org/environment/climate-change/2024/08/ca...
Almost 25% of vehicles sold in California are electrified in some way, and California offers rebates to low-income drivers:
https://www.energy.ca.gov/news/2024-05/zero-emission-vehicle...
High gas taxes and financial incentives to electrify are exactly how you motivate people to stop using gasoline cars.
this part is not about California. Electricity cost increased significantly in California lately: https://blog.citadelrs.com/hs-fs/hubfs/CRS-blog-Sept2023-PG%... and that graph doesn't include several last hikes.
If it were only the lack of nuclear plants.
You can't just wave your hands about the climate and then hope to create a new market overnight.
In any case, point still stands, you're more than "one smart decision" away from having electrified the American fleet of vehicles.
Is there less tracking in new gas cars?
Investing in nuclear power would stall the entire electrical revolution that is on going.
High capital cost with a long delay before it starts paying back. Worse the capital cost of overhead lines is higher than batteries.
What's happened to a lot of alternative ideas is they no longer pencil out because solar and batteries have gotten so cheap. Like solar thermal, doesn't pencil out. Wind and solar, plus batteries is cheaper than coal.
Is that really true? My understanding is that the bus systems that use overheads lines do so because it is overall cheaper. And it won’t have the negative issues of batteries (mining, recycling, geopolitics). Yes there is cost to equipping vehicles but it is a small number of larger vehicles which might make the problem easier. I would think the cost of the actual overhead lines is low (it is usually a small part of the costs for building rail for example).
The cost of a 250 kwh battery is then about the same as 200 feet of overhead lines.
[0] https://www.sciencefriday.com/segments/clean-air-act-50-year...
Go to electric. What about the environmental impact on battery creation/recycling/maintenance? Or the electricity to power them (until nuclear comes online)?
This line of argumentation can go on endlessly. How about instead let’s reduce taxes and try focusing on lowering the cost of living for middle and lower income brackets.
Doesn’t New York City do this with a soda tax?
What happens when taxes are so high, we have an egress of businesses from regions within the US causing collapse of local communities like saw with Detroit?
The point is, when navigating a highly dimensional design space it's ok to use a gradient descent / greedy optimization approach. If step 1 works then proceed to step 2, if step 1 did not work then we learned something and can pick a different step. Fix whatever went wrong in making the mistake with picking step 1 as the current top priority. It makes no sense to say that we can't make step 1 because step 1001 might be bad.
On the point of taxation, I personally dislike tax precisely because I think the money is not allocated in anything close to priority order. If it was we would be living in a vastly different world.
Like you just magically saying "let's cut taxes and reduce cost of living"?
>we have an egress of businesses from regions within the US causing collapse of local communities like saw with Detroit?
If all you're worried about is big business, don't worry. They already leaving. Communities are already collapsing. And we voted for it, so hey. Democracy works right?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sugary_drink_tax#Impact
We’re at an incredible deficit as a nation, interest alone on that deficit outpacing defense spending.
Creating additional taxes, which will potentially slow growth/gdp, will only harm our efforts to resolve our woeful financial situation as a nation. Additional taxes further pushes business out of the country, leading to a spiral to insolvency.
Californian’s should be asking, where do these taxes go? Not to solving homelessness or violent crime. Not to resolving catastrophic water issues (reservoirs drying up), or fixing brownouts across the region.
And you haven’t addressed how you’re going to get people to stop using oil without taxes.
>How about instead let’s reduce taxes and try focusing on lowering the cost of living for middle and lower income brackets.
Oh don't worry, Musk is getting a huge tax cut.
A good to know is California has some programs where they will buy back your older vehicle and pay you a grant of you replace it with a new or used low emissions vehicle. You can also get public transit vouchers instead I think.
Note. Low emissions includes hybrids. And some used EV's are really affordable.
For Americans. For the Chinese? Probably a different story.
It has continually tightened standards and its overall air quality is improving (although it still has notable areas where more improvement is needed)
https://enviliance.com/regions/east-asia/cn/cn-air/cn-air-ac...
https://www.cfr.org/blog/chinas-battle-against-air-pollution...
China, etc is cheaper not only because of the cost of labor but because of lack of environmental protections.
We know now that while these laws have local impacts they clearly also have global impacts and they are not always positive.
Attempting to use the local success of the EPA Clean Air Act to justify a flat 16%+ increase in the price of a widely used and important commodity is inappropriate.
How is the high speed rail in California going? Asking for a friend. Is California able to build public transport fast? To make it safe? Is is able to keep the vagrants, homeless, smelly, and crazy away so to make it palatable for the good standing citizens to use them?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angela_Merkel#Criticism
And they need to invest in better public transit. Imagine LA with SF-level public transit. Or SF with NYC-level public transit (or better).
Tokyo was so relaxing. Greater Tokyo has the same population as the entire state of CA and yet was so quiet.
Am I OK with it? Not really. But I think we need to figure out what the general principled way of thinking about this is. People make all sorts of choices that are good and bad for their health. We could ask the same question about those who are overweight due to overeating, or those who want cosmetic surgery relating to a gender transition, or those who get injured due to an extreme sport, or whatever. Should we pick and choose who to subsidize?
The proponents of the initiative heavily focused on saying repeal would lower the price of gas. The opponents focused on how much money cap and trade raised and what it was being used for (transportation infrastructure, clean air and water projects, wildfire prevention, for example).
I think voters recognized that the things the money is being used for are things that have to be addressed and they would rather the money come from something that at least somewhat correlates with those issues than from some more general revenue source like property taxes or sales taxes.
We really need more affordable electric cars in Washington. We've got high gas prices (and still would have high gas prices even if the initiative had passed [1]), and low electricity prices.
Yes, I know many people need more range, or do not have a good place to charge cheaply or conveniently. But there are a lot of people who are fine with the range, or who have multiple cars and could make one be an EV to cover all the shorter range driving, and who do have a cheap convenient way to charge.
In my area (western Washington but not in Seattle) the electric utility (PSE) is doing a trial of time of usage (TOU) rates. They are trying out three plans, one specifically for EV owners. It is a two year trial just entering the second year. From what I've read it seems likely they will continue after the trial--the trial is more to work out kinks rather than to decided if they want to offer TOU.
Normal marginal rates here are about $0.12/kWh. On the TOU rate I'm on they are $0.08/kWh off-peak and $0.19/kWh summer peak and $0.33/kWh winter peak. Summer is Apr-Sep and peak isc 5-8 pm M-F. Winter is Oct-Mar and peak is 5-8 pm M-F and 7-10 am M-F.
On the TOU plan for EV households, off-peak is around $.09/kWh, summer peak around $0.17/kWh, and winter peak around $0.31/kWh, but they also add "super off-peak" which is 11 pm to 7 am every day and is around $0.05/kWh.
If you could get gas for the current national average price of a little over $3/gallon you would need to use it in an ICE car that gets over 240 mpg for it to be cheaper than the cost to charge an EV on the EV TOU plan if you do all your charging during super off-peak. (For people not on any TOU plan they save with an EV if their ICE doesn't get over 100 mpg).
I've read that there is supposed to be a big increase in the availability of used EVs around 2026, due to a big increase in EV leases in 2023. Most leases are 3 year leases, and many of those will be available as used EVs when the leases are up.
[1] Gas prices vary a lot from state to state even between states that have the same taxes and fees. A big part of that is different transportation costs. How far you are from refineries and from pipelines and ports makes a big difference.
When invited to the trial I went over my past bills and calculated my potential savings. You can download PSE usage data that covers usage over 15-minute intervals so it was easy to write a program to look at my past bills and tell me (1) what they would have been if I had been under TOU but made no changes to usage, and (2) what they would have done if I could have moved any given percentage of my peak usage to off-peak.
That showed I'd save about 1% with no usage changes. If I could shift all my peak to off-peak I'd save about 30%.
Here's what I did to reduce peak usage.
• Turn off heating during peak.
• Turn water heater thermostat to the "vacation" setting during peak.
• Move things I use hot water for to non-peak. Most of my hot water use is laundry, dishwashing, and bathing. For laundry I moved laundry day from Friday to Saturday. For dishwashing if I need to use the dishwasher on a weekday I time it for non-peak. I didn't need to change bathing because that is in the morning, and even if it happens to be during morning peak it will be my first hot water use of the day. My water heater is well enough insulated that it can handle that fine.
• The move of laundry to Saturday took care of my biggest non-water heating appliance: the electric clothes dryer.
• I try to avoid using the oven during peak. Not a big deal because the main thing I use the oven for is bake-at-home pizza and I don't do that often.
Here are some things I did not change.
• Microwave and George Foreman grill. At first I did, but then put the grill on a Kill-a-Watt and found out that the difference between peak and off-peak in winter over the course of cooking a burger or a grilled cheese sandwich was something like $0.02.
• Computers, iPhone/iPad/Watch/Kindle charging, A/V system, lights.
In the year before TOU, 17.6% of my usage was during peak hours. In the first year of TOU it was 5.1%. That works out to a savings of $190. That's somewhere in the 15-20% savings range.
The state gets hooked on the tax money.