Illinois might start charging $1k per year to own an electric vehicle | Hacker News Reader

Illinois might start charging $1k per year to own an electric vehicle

chicagotribune.com

39 pointsgravy63 comments

Political might-or-might-not stories aren't substantive enough to be on topic here. They're cousins to announcement-of-an-announcements.

Note how they had to give this one a booster shot with 'It's outrageous'!

> The justification for the dramatic hike? Electric vehicles don’t provide the state with any gas tax revenue.

Oh, that's just farcical. Americans drive an average of slightly less than 14k miles / year. At that 44¢/gal tax rate, that's ~$200 of tax / year; nowhere near the proposed $1000. And this comparison assumes that the state doesn't tax electricity at all.

This smells like someone's representative has been bought and paid for.

There's more to it than that.

"...more than double the state’s gas tax to 44 cents a gallon, double the driver’s license fee to $60 and raise the vehicle registration fee to $148. The driver’s license fee is now $30; the vehicle registration fee is $98. It also would significantly hike the registration fee for electric vehicles, from $17.50 to $1,000."

$17.50 → $1,000 is one heck of a jump. As is $98 → $148. For some reason I find the doubling of the driver's license fee as less offensive. Maybe because it doesn't have to be paid every year.

One way that Illinois is a lot like Texas is that legacy auto dealers are enormous sources of political contributions.

its more than that though. gas "tax" helps pay for road building and maintenance. These cars are still using the roads and still expect more to be built. the money has to come from somewhere...

In Australia they're having a very similar conversation about people going "off grid" and still having to pay utilities, because those services are needed by the greater community (hospitals, water and sewage and those not yet fortunate enough to be able to afford going off grid)

Really takes some of the shine out of the renewable scene...

> gas "tax" helps pay for road building and maintenance. These cars are still using the roads and still expect more to be built. the money has to come from somewhere...

That's the point: I'm not saying that EVs shouldn't pay for their fair share of road maintenance. But the hike heavily implies that's not the case here: EVs are paying more than their non-electric counterparts (see the math in the post you're replying to). And not just a little more, several times more.

Since people are finally realizing that electric vehicles can be superior to internal combustion engines, let’s talk about the real problem, how do we extract taxes from them? </s>

Seriously though, many states are all pushing these EV taxes at once. It almost makes you wonder if there is a concerted effort to make EVs less attractive. If you were a state representative, wouldn’t you first want to see tangible tax revenue decline before slapping a new tax on a thriving industry?

Not if your lobbiests don't have that same concern.

Or perhaps they're realizing that, as EVs become more popular, the roads still need to be maintained and want to get ahead of the problem.

If every penny of the gas tax had to be spent on public road and infrastructure improvements, then there'd likely be broad based support for raising and - as with this proposal - expanding it as needed. However I'd be willing to bet that the majority if not the entirety of this tax increase will be spent on legacy pension bailouts instead.

According to this[1], Illinois state gas tax goes all over the place.

- 2½¢/gallon to the State Construction Account Fund.

- $420,000/month for boating safety

- $350,000/month to improve railroad crossings

- A "sufficient" amount to legal fees

- A "sufficient" amount for the administrator and supervisor

- $30 million/year for vehicle inspection

- "Amounts ordered paid by the Court of Claims"

- Fuel tax payments to other states

Then, of what's left...

- 17% to road construction

- 28% to a road and bridge program

- 27% to all municipalities, divided by population

- 9% to Cook County (Chicago)

- 10% to counties other than Cook, based on the number of drivers licenses issued

- 9% to the townships and road districts, based on the number of miles of road

Sounds like Illinois to me.

[1] https://idot.illinois.gov/Assets/uploads/files/Transportatio...

> - $350,000/month to improve railroad crossings

Unless I missed something, this number is incorrect according to https://www.icc.illinois.gov/railroad/

> Each month $3.5 million in state motor fuel tax receipts is transferred from the Motor Fuel Tax (MFT) fund to the Grade Crossing Protection Fund. This amount provides the GCPF with $39 million annually to be used for safety improvements at highway/rail crossings on local roads and streets.

Off topic, but this seemed like an enormous amount of money to me. And that doesn't seem to include crossings on state highways which come out of a different fund.

So the state of Illinois is spending at least $117,000 per day on railroad crossings. According to the same page, Illinois has 7,600 railroad crossings so that's at least $15 per day for every railroad crossing in the state.

Edit: I just reviewed your source and it is also cited at 3.5 million.

Why can’t the gas tax be extended to electricity provided to vehicles (ie superchargera) rather than ownership of EV?

That would be very difficult to enforce. Most miles driven by most EVs come from home charging. That’s usually just plugging into a standard 240V outlet (or even a standard 120V outlet like you’d use to charge a phone). There’s rarely any separate metering.

More feasible would be some sort of per-mile tax based on the car’s odometer at the end of each year.

gas taxes do not even come close to paying for road maintenance.

https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2015/05/debunking-the...

Personally - since I rarely drive - this would keep me on gas powered cars indefinitely. There's no way my driving habits amount to $1000 in gas taxes every year.

I can see how they'd think it was reasonable if they just did the average of cumulative gas taxes per person, but it doesn't account for use in any way.

Illinois wants to raise their gas tax to 44 cents per gallon. Assuming 20 mpg you'd have to drive about 45,000 miles to hit $1000 in State gas tax. If you factor in the Federal gas tax too, it drops to about 30,000 miles. The average American driver drives less than 15,000 miles per year. So a fair equivalent in terms of EV tax would be $500 or less, especially if you consider that the drivers racking up the most miles per year are probably the least likely to buy EV vehicles due to range and charging station limitations.

They are also raising the same fee for standard vehicles to $148. So, it’s an extra 852$ a year for electric cars, or a little over 25k miles including federal taxes at 20MPG, or 50k miles at 40MPG.

Depending on how it’s classified, plug in Hybrids could be a real winner. Avoid range issues, while also minimizing gas usage in daily driving.

I've put 50k miles on my prius over the past 6 years, with the vast majority of my fuel coming from out of state. I would be a fool to switch to EV.

Not surprised coming from the state that wants to tax Netflix [0]. Who's in charge of coming up with these technologically-regressive taxes anyway? I guess they're looking for any way they can to prevent bankruptcy, but these kind of things really rub me the wrong way.

[0]: https://www.illinoispolicy.org/illinois-bill-would-expand-ch...

What's wrong with taxing Netflix?

Internet companies have been able to avoid paying a lot of taxes, but that's not going to last forever.

> What's wrong with taxing Netflix? Internet companies have been able to avoid paying a lot of taxes,

You're mixing two different concepts here. There is a sales tax that applies to any purchase, which many internet companies did avoid for a while - although now you'll see that Amazon does automatically apply a sales tax on purchases depending on your ZIP. Although it would be more accurate to call it a use tax, since conceptually it's the same tax that you should pay if you had gone and bought the product in another state and brought it back home (although no one does this). The idea is that this tax compensates for the loss of business that a local company may have experienced due to you buying the good out-of-state.

In the "tax Netflix" case, it's not a sales tax being proposed (your monthly subscription fee already includes that). It's almost like a vice tax, which is traditionally used to discourage certain behavior (i.e. cigarette tax), except movie theaters in Chicago aren't suddenly going out of business and there's nothing harmful about consuming Netflix.

So it's hard to make an honest argument that there is any socially positive reason for this tax, and I can't see a "Netflix tax" as anything other than an opportunistic cash grab by the city. In my book, that's "wrong", but I guess it depends how much latitude you personally believe cities should have in creating arbitrary tax schemes.

The article would be more helpful if it provided estimates of what gasoline-vehicle owners typically pay each year.

If it is equivalent, and I doubt it is, then a more effective strategy would not be lump sum shockers like this.

It's in the article:

> the proposed legislation would also more than double the state’s gas tax to 44 cents a gallon and raise the registration fee for standard vehicles to $148, from $98, among other elements.

only if you make assumptions or seek out information about fuel efficiency and miles typically driven in that state.

The same bill proposes a 44c/gallon tax, which means an EV registration prepays for about 60-70k miles of driving.

Since neither gasoline nor electric cars or light trucks do any damage to roads compared to commercial trucking, it doesn’t make sense to talk about either kind of car paying its fair share. That is just a rhetorical method of selling the public on a new tax.

In Illinois most of the wear on the asphalt surface occurs via ice and snow causing potholes. This happens over time regardless of heavy traffic.

While this may be true, big rigs and other ultra-heavy vehicles cause a disproportionate amount of wear as well.

[0] https://streets.mn/2016/07/07/chart-of-the-day-vehicle-weigh...

The source for that data is a bicycling blog in Colorado which no longer exists. Without verifiable data, I'd ignore it.

If they used crumb rubber asphalt hybrid, it wouldn't be a problem, but the fucking unions lobbied and blocked it. I cant find that source but recall it was a story on the news years ago in Chicago. Unions said if that was used, they'd be out of jobs becuase roads would last longer... yeah.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubberized_asphalt

Trucking and weather damage both contribute, and each exacerbates the other. On roads with lighter traffic, patches last longer, too.

compared to commercial trucking

Commercial trucking pays far higher fuel, registration, and road use taxes than private automobiles.

Yes, but those costs are still disproportionately low compared to road wear and value per trip. Cars and light trucks pay fuel taxes simply because regressive, automatically applied taxes are easy to collect and aren’t challenged by effective legislation.

...or if it included amount of Federal tax credit the EV owners got from the government when they purchased the car.

For different reasons, there's been articles in years past about high-end EVs having high car registration fees. This isn't due to them being electric, it's due to some models being fairly expensive (e.g. Model S/X, i-Pace) with a taxation system that determines registration fees based on vehicle value. This is also very particular to cities, where their intentions are encourage and fund more public transit use.

Links specific to WA state / Seattle:

https://komonews.com/news/local/drivers-facing-sticker-shock... - King County (includes Seattle, WA) car registration tabs can be rather high to fund transit initiatives.

https://www.geekwire.com/2019/sb-5971-ev-registration-fees/ - WA state has charged 100/year for EVs, set to be 150/year in the future. The intent is to cover state-level road maintenance.

It's worth remembering the high fee concerns may change as more EVs get cheaper, and factor in Federal / State tax rebates that occur upon purchase. I don't own an EV, but personally I worry a bit less about the govt-imposed fees and more about the higher insurance costs for certain EVs (Tesla models).

> This is also very particular to cities

It's not, because registration fees being locality discursiva isn't a thing in all states; also, a large minority of states have adopted registration surcharges on electric and sometimes hybrid vehicles for road construction to offset some of the gas tax losses.

http://www.ncsl.org/research/energy/new-fees-on-hybrid-and-e...

I was talking about value-based registration fees (which tend to be particular to cities - particularly those whose tax revenue is primarly based on comsumption/sales tax like WA), not EV-specific fees (which are generally statewide).

> I was talking about value-based registration fees (which tend to be particular to cities

Lots of states have value-based registration fees.

“I thought Illinois was progressive and would want to encourage EV ownership.”

Illinois just pretends to be progressive because it allows politically connected people to steal more money.

An Illinois Democrat will have many of the same views and votes as a Republican in another state. (Examples: Almost every Chicago mayor since the 1950's)

It's one of the things that made me realize that there is no longer Democrat/Republican Progressive/Conservative in American politics. It's all just people aligning themselves with whichever tribe they think will propel them the farthest in their particular geography.

Let's envision a world where only electric vehicles are driven. How is a tax collected to keep the roads in good shape - an electricity consumption tax?

Pay per mile when renewing your vehicle registration, with a tax modifier based on vehicle weight and axle count?

Is there a reason income + property + sales taxes can't maintain roads as well? You don't need to tax cars to fund roads, you don't need to tax paper to fund schools.

In states without a lot of taxable land, vehicle registration pays for schools.

It's why a car that costs less than $100 to register in Illinois costs $600 or more to register in Nevada.

It's obviously problematic but the impetus: missing tax revenues to pay for infrastructure - is a very real issue.

If as it turns out fuel taxes were major contributors to paying for the roads that make cars possible ... well, this issue has to be addressed.

Ecological issues aside, the underlying economic impacts are real, and we should consider them enlightening in a way because they help us understand just how much things cost, how they get paid for, and what we're going to need to do if we want to realign everything.

Without knowing the breakdown ... maybe it's just possible that good chunk of 'gas savings' is really just 'not having to pay taxes which pay for roads'.

Maybe as a commenter above pointed out, it's only closer to '$200/year' - fair enough, but I think even a $200 tax might be unsettling to us as well.

I don't know what the answer is, but whatever it is, we can't ignore some of these realities.

Since gasoline taxes for road improvements are actually a scam (good luck proving where the money actually goes) , they should just change it to a registration fee for everyone. Eliminating a tax saves a lot of money and I imagine a gas tax is rather complicated to administer.

good luck proving where the money actually goes

Unwarranted cynicism is unhelpful. There are laws that determine where the money goes. Those laws and the distribution formulas are online. As are the audits. No, you won't find it with a 12-second Google search. You'll actually have to look for yourself.

The other possibility, and this has already been floated in Illinois, is putting a tracker on every vehicle and taxing drivers by the mile.

A gas tax increase, in comparison, doesn't look so bad.

My suggestion is considering the negative externalizes from gasoline powered cars it would be better to make up the revenue with an excise tax on new ICE cars.

IE, don't tax fossil fuels, tax products that commit us to consuming fossil fuels.

I would prefer they attach a use tax to the electric chargers (both home and elsewhere). This $1k per year tax is going to make sure no lower income person buy an electric car. The at-the-pump taxes are gradual and not a catastrophic hit. At some point we will get charging technology close enough to have them replace gas stations and folks won't have to have a garage / upper class apartment parking to own an electric car.

Although we are talking politicians, I am pretty sure someone can come up with a formula involving the weight of the vehicle and range to match it to the tax of ICE vehicles.

Yeah, I mean, how many new taxes can we get put on us? It's insane. How about fixing the budget instead. We already have the highest property taxes. No wonder people are leaving in droves.

Americans spend $50k for a car and want their roads for free.

Federal government gives rebates for electric vehicles. States tax electric vehicles. Fantastic.

The article says that the state is giving rebates as well ...

> $7,500 in federal incentives and $4,000 in state incentives

Disgusting abuse of taxes.

Illinois is a case-study in the cancer that is party politicians, unfulfillable promises, and decades of iteration thereof.

Illinois is a case study of the cancer that is Mike Madigan, the shadow governor of the state for more than 30 years. He is perhaps the last of the old-school Democratic machine bosses, although he would operate exactly the same way if he was a nominal Republican. Until the man dies, the state will continue to rot.

the last of the old-school Democratic machine bosses

If only. There's plenty of others in the background waiting for their chance.

It’s a case study of what happens when most voters don’t pay attention to state and local politicians, allowing the politicians who scratch the unions’ backs to be elected and then they keep fudging the numbers since both the politicians and union members who benefit will be long gone when the problem comes around.

Sort of. Not exactly.

The voters do pay attention. The politicians scratch the union's back, and those voters are members of the unions.

There are far more non union voters than union voters so it’s only a matter of how many non union voters turn out.

There’s absolutely no reason governments employees shouldn’t have been switched to 401k by now, other than only a few thousand voters show up to vote on millions of dollars of debt.

In theory, yes. There are a lot more registered non-union voters than there are registered union voters. But union voters have a far higher voting rate, and the u jobs work hard to ensure that remains the case.

Other than corruption, which I don't see any indication of, I don't see how the union workers "work hard" to make sure the non union voters have a lower voter turnout.

It's simply the voter's lack of time, ability to absorb information about government finances, and most importantly, lack of willingness to engage in their civic duty that has led us to where we are. Even still, most people I talk to don't want to spend 15 minutes googling their local representatives.

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