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Comment by ajuc | Hacker News Reader

That world is called Europe :) Taxation is indirect, gasoline is taxed.

Which is great for all those people who fill up on electricity. Mostly rich people.

Many more people ride bikes than drive electric vehicles.

I mean, it is cheaper but it's not that cheap. There was recently a post here showing very clearly that for example in Germany electricity is so expensive that a good diesel car beats it in terms of cost easily. Even here in the UK if I were to charge at public points it would again be cheaper to just drive a diesel. It only becomes cheaper when I charge at home with a good tariff.

Besides, seeing as our roads are exclusively maintained from fuel taxes, I cannot see this going on forever - the government will have to find a way to tax the electricity going into electric cars somehow.

I imagine an odometer reading would do the trick. Like a gas meter, but on electric cars.

I mean the car I have(volvo phev) currently has a deal where Volvo pays me back for the 1st year of electricity used by the car, they do it by having the car automatically upload the number of kWh used to Volvo servers, then they will pay me back based on the number of kWh I've used during that year.

I don't see why something similar couldn't be done for taxes - the car keeps track of kWh used and you just pay tax based on how much you used. Obviously, that runs into certain immediate problems - like, what if you drive abroad? Normally you'd simply buy fuel while abroad, so therefore contribute to taxes there - but with this system this wouldn't work anymore.

Maybe a GPS and pay-per-km-driven scheme would be more tamper proof. You can spoof a GPS as well, but it can be double-checked automatically by state traffic cams.

Sounds evil-ish, but how about gasoline tax paying for electric car recharge? Electric cars being very expensive to buy is a problem though. You'd end up subsidising those who are already wealthy.

Gas tax doesn't stop car dependence. In LA one gas station might be two dollars more a gallon than another one 5 blocks down the road (not due to tax, I'm really not sure why this happens), and both are packed with customers during rush hour. If you are well off enough where you can afford to pay >$5 a gallon without thinking about it, no reasonable tax is going to change your behavior. These people sitting in traffic 5 days a week in these black Mercedes luxury-safari-imperialist SUVs wouldn't care if gas was $15 a gallon.

There's taxes on gasoline in the us and most other countries as well

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