A flat tax, like a sales tax, is regressive & hurts the poor, property taxes hurt the elderly & those on a fixed income, while income taxes unfairly mean the rich pay more $. No tax is fair if you’re in the ‘wrong’ group.
Per gallon fuel taxes traditionally paid for road maintenance. MPG has risen on ICE vehicles, meaning less $ for road repair & EVs don’t pay anything towards road maintenance. Roads wear out based upon miles driven, & age & weather conditions (salt in winter) not based upon the propulsion system of the vehicle driven. I’d hardly call it a conspiracy theory to make EVs pay their fair share.
But these EV fees are flat rate (per vehicle, per year), not depending on how much they are driven.
My state just implemented this, and as a Chevy Volt owner, I’ll have a $100 charge tacked on to the registration fee starting this year. If I had a pure EV, that fee is $200 a year. But if I had a 30 mpg gasoline car, I’d only pay $50 a year in state gasoline tax, because my car is only driven about 8000 miles a year.
When I said I don’t like to get into conspiracy theories, I didn’t mean to suggest that was one of them. I mean thing like ‘someone invented a car that gets 100 MPG, but big oil/gov won’t let it get to the market’. That kinda stuff. The extra tax on EVs isn’t a theory.
Per gallon fuel tax pays for road maintenance, but so does property tax, toll money, vehicle registration etc. It all goes towards it. It would be nice if the gov wouldn’t advocate for getting more efficient cars and then punish you for doing so.
Perhaps the best way, ignoring the specifics of ‘how’ for a moment, would be for them to tax you based on the weight of your car and the amount of miles you drive in a year.
Those are the only two things about any specific vehicle that directly coordinate to how much roads are damaged.
I’m guessing things will change over the coming years since the fuel tax was put in place before anyone even thought electric passenger cars.
This would probably be fairly easy, actually. The weight of the vehicle is a known quantity for almost all cars and we can probably ignore the tiny percentage of cars that are modified far enough from the factory weight to matter.
Milage could be self reported on registration and checked at inspections/law enforcement encounters/vehicle sales.
Of course, we’ll probably actually implement it with always on GPS trackers in ever car, because that’s the sort of future we’re trending toward.
I spend a lot of time identifying rural aerial photos from the 1960s through the 1990s. I would say that gas stations have the highest attrition rate of any similar sized business. We are down to probably 25-30% of what once existed. I can point to many area crossroads that used to have 2 or 3 stations and now have none. Brand loyalty used to be very high so every company had to be represented in a fairly small area.
I think many of those stations you’re seeing weren’t there just to provide gasoline but to service cars. In decades past, cars required a lot more in the way of lube jobs and flat tire repairs than they do now.
I’m in a small mountainous California village with 4 fuel stations within 5 miles. The nearest charging stations are 1/2 hour away, 20 miles downhill. Holiday resorts are uphill but the next chargers that way are 100 miles off. EVs will not penetrate here soon.
I’m in PG&E territory. Their last planned outage left an unpowered swathe of 500 miles along the Sierra Nevada range. Their infrastructure isn’t very secure anyway. EVs aren’t suitable when juice isn’t available. I can throw an extra can of fuel in an ICEV trunk - but backup batteries? Right.
I predict states will enact mileage fees per vehicle to fund road maintenance. Drive anything more --> pay more. I predict local and state governments will extract car-computer data to justify speeding fines. Our cars will fink on us. I predict jurisdictions will get into the charger-station business.
I won’t be surprised if Big Petroleum pushes development of quiet, low-emission External Combustion Engine (ECE) vehicles, steamers that can burn low-grade products, in order to keep their retail supply networks alive. Or they could just write-off those networks as losses.
Petroleum infrastructure won’t vanish anytime soon. But it’ll mutate.
Entirely different sort of infrastructure; and it hasn’t gone away. You can still buy hay and grain (or grow your own.) You can still buy stables and fences (or build your own.) For that matter, you can still buy new harnesses and buggies – and do a lot of your own repairs on old ones.
But all of those things can be provided – and in most cases are provided – by quite small enterprises, which can set up shop in a whole lot of areas. A modern gasoline refinery? Not so much, I suspect (though it occurs to me that I wouldn’t have the faintest idea where to start.)
It’s not an imminent problem; and it’s certainly not a reason to not switch over to less damaging means of transport. (Propping up the ICE infrastructure, as opposed to propping up the people who find it difficult to lose it, may not be the way to go.) But it’s a different type of problem than the horse-and-buggy one.
Actually, Rivian, who releases their truck and SUV next year, has patents for a back up expandable battery system. Their focus is on EVs for overlanding where their typical 400 mile range won’t be sufficient. EVs aren’t there yet but 2020/2021 has a lot of new vehicles coming to market that should solve a lot of the existing problems.
I’ve done a little work on ethanol fuel refineries particularly with a bio diesel coproduct. It takes 900 acres and a 5,000 sqft production faculty to provide the fuel needs for 300 people. Its not linear but to provide the fuel for even a small town of 10,000 people the facility would need probably 30,000 acres and a 1 acre production facility. You’d probably employ about 50 people for the operation as well.
The reality is it’s easier to charge you a flat fee, & make you overpay (because when does the government under tax?) than to pass the necessary laws & build the infrastructure to ensure your mileage is accurately reporting & you are fined appropriately for under reporting it.
While you may do only 8000 miles per year that is below average; I’m sure there’d be many people self-reporting even less mileage if reporting mileage was related to a tax.
I have a feeling that eventually we’ll see one of two things, either larger capacity batteries that will give us more than 400 mile range and be able to be charged quickly, or we’ll see swap-in rechargeable battery packs, kind of like we do with propane cylinders.
The idea would be that you’re driving from say… Great Falls to Bismarck, and you can’t make it on one charge, so you’d stop in Circle, Montana and swap your depleted battery packs out for charged ones, and go on your merry way. The charging station would take your packs and charge them up, and swap them out with someone else.
Of course, this would take some reasonable amount of monitoring and recycling of packs that have lost their ability to hold a charge, but if they’re designed right, that might not be such an issue.
Well, it didn’t look like downtown to me-but certainly in the city. Certainly there were no gas stations in the downtown/business sections of the city that we visited.
It seems likely that the tour guide may have exaggerated the situation somewhat.
I think many of the Vancouver initiatives are voluntary and local. The city is certainly pushing against cars. That is clear from the local road structure. When it was possible to install bike lanes alongside existing roads they did so-but when it wasn’t possible there was no hesitation in closing a traffic lane and dedicating it to bike travel. The cars were funneled over to the remaining lane. Not particularly energy efficient for the cars, but the priority was clear.
Tesla demonstrated swappable battery packs in the Model S several years ago. There are YouTube videos showing it done by machine in less than a couple of minutes. But they seem to have dropped that idea. And this was the big thing behind Better Place.
For now EV market penetration is way too small to have any noticeable effect on the gas station business, much smaller effect than stuff like mpg’s of ICE vehicles creeping up, slightly less propensity to drive overall, and moreover just changes in the gas retailing business itself: high volume places pushing out low volume places, the car repair business being less able to support gas stations (was often the ‘where they really make their profit’ thing before convenience stores and still is for some small stations), etc. In some inner metro areas, in Manhattan for example there are hardly any gas stations left, gas stations are disappearing because the land they are on is just too valuable for that use given cars’ ability to easily go a few miles to where land is a little cheaper.
In the longer future when/if EV’s ever reach a large market penetration the cost of gas isn’t just going to go up to support the current number of stations. The number of stations will drop. And in the parts of the US the vast majority of people live there are scads of gas stations now. As was noted, in the ‘golden age of motoring’ of long past decades in the US there was way less gasoline consumed than now but the cost of refining, distributing and retailing it, though less efficient than now, didn’t make it that much more expensive.
Underreporting is going to be hard to get away with in most cases. Most states have some kind of regular inspection where the milage is noted, so you can’t underreport for long. And sales of cars also note the milage. No one is going to be able to underreport milage for very long.
Probably an idea ahead of its time somewhat, especially in Better Place’s case.
Right now, it takes somewhere between 5 and 10 minutes to completely fill a car’s gas tank from nearly empty, giving roughly 400 miles of range.
EVs are going to need to have similar charging performance eventually- if you could charge your EV in the time it takes for you to go into the gas station, pee, get a snack/drink and check-out, you’re in the right ballpark. But if you do all that, and STILL need to wait another 20 minutes for your car to be fully charged, that’s not going to be popular. That’s why I think swappable batteries will end up being an option in the future.
It’s probably more of an excess than that now. Car tanks take only a couple of minutes to fill, 8-9 gpm perhaps avg pump rate (10 gpm the legal max generally in US) and teens gallons a fill. Of course there’s overhead of setting things up, but there is for charging too.
The pee stop and a little shopping gets you to the 5-10 minutes, but charging time is more like 40 minutes to 80% or something like that. To feel EV is a transparently easy way to travel by road you’ve got to psyche yourself into it. Which some people do and maybe a large % of people eventually will, but objectively it’s really not. OTOH of course on trips within car’s radius with home charger it could more reasonably be viewed as no more or even slightly less hassle than fueling an ICE car.
Swappable battery is an idea, which had failed in attempted commercialization, by Better Place
But might succeed at some point.
More likely IMO EV’s just aren’t going to be a really huge thing in the US for a very long time without a big step up in public policies to bribe and/or force people to buy them. Which might also happen. Anyway, ICE cars dropping to a small % of the market is highly speculative and getting way ahead of ourselves as an issue to closely examine in the US IMO. It’s among the big constellation of decades forward energy, climate and related stuff you simply cannot predict with a useful degree of precision, despite many people’s tendency to think they can just read up on ‘expert’ opinion then know what’s going to happen. Peak oil, etc, not actually predictable.
Certainly there were no gas stations in the downtown/business sections of the city that we visited.