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Comment by ostenning | Hacker News Reader

Meanwhile in Australia: electric cars are getting taxed more to support the aging oil infrastructure

Similar in California and other states. The states typically tax gasoline and since electrics don't use any they are implementing special fees on electric vehicle purchases to make up for lost revenue.

One would think that the savings in pollution (not only for the car itself, but the transport of the fuel, pollution from refineries, etc.) would offset any lost revenue from gas taxes.

What makes this really nonsensical is that many states still have electric vehicle rebates. They give you a rebate of a few thousand dollars to reward you for buying an electric vehicle but then charge you a few hundred dollars to punish you for buying an electric vehicle.

EVs still drive on roads.

Roads? Where were going we don't need... Well, ok, I guess the future didn't work out that way after all.

So do bicycles which pay no road taxes :)

Since road wear is proportional to something like axle-weight to the power of four, bikes essentially don't matter.

In Colorado at least it's not that high. $50 plus a small amount (today) that goes up over time to no more than $96 in the 2031-2032 fiscal year.

It's CERTAINLY a lot less than you'd be paying in gas tax if you used your car an average amount.

Taxes aren't punishment, anyway. Especially "road use taxes", which are, in this case, used to repair the roads you're driving on.

[1] https://afdc.energy.gov/laws/11486

Taxes are a form of punishment, they're a tool to discourage certain behaviours relative to others.

Whether roads are funded by road taxes or primary school fees doesn't matter - if we want to promote a behaviour we subsidize it; if we want to discourage it, we tax it.

Whether and how the books balance in the background isn't relevant.

Oh my god, no they aren’t. Taxes are a tool for society to function. They can be used to discourage things, sure, but they are not a punishment in most cases. Do you consider paying for your meal at a restaurant a punishment? Give me a break.

A tax on electric vehicles isn't necessary for society to function. It's just a medium for adding money to what is already more graft. So yes, it is effectively a tool to direct certain behaviors. As are all VAT and luxury taxes.

Income taxes are the major part of the income that society needs to function. The rest of the lot are just punitive ones, like estate and wealth taxes.

Then why are you not charged for napkins at a resturant? Regardless of need how the fees and taxes are distributed does lead to an effective discouragement - which is synonymous with punishment. It doesn't need an authority to impose them. The punishment for not unzipping your fly when peeing at a urinal is peeing your pants.

I don't think income tax is there to punish you for having income: even with the tax higher pre-tax income results in higher after-tax income. But even if road usage linked fees were a punishment, it is against car ownership in general, which seems fair to me. The relative incentive of electric over gas is still there.

Punishment is really incorrect. Taxes are a form of incentive. It is a behavioral nudge, not a flogging.

That's a simplistic view of one type of tax. If everyone in a community wants the city government to build a recreation center, and then government levies a tax on the citizens to pay for building/operating the center, are they being punished?

Technically we want to punish people for driving a car. Electrics are of course better than ICEs, but they're still a lot worse that cycling or taking a train. It would of course be nice if the infrastructure wasn't optimized for cars...

Road wear is disproportionately caused by heavy vehicles; one study estimated that "one 18-wheeler is equivalent to the impact of 9,600 cars". The gas tax is primarily a subsidy designed to support the trucking industry.

Or you can think of the trucking industry as subsidised. Trucks are used to haul goods to shops yes? Taxing them more will just increase the price of everyday goods and services (that depend on goods to function), it will unpopular among just about everyone but the rich (who won’t feel the impact of the price increase much).

You're not wrong, but this is the part where capitalism is supposed to encourage people to use methods that cost less in externalities. Businesses should pay for their externalities or else they aren't competing with each other fairly.

The question of who it is a subsidy to is important, but it is better to directly give them a subsidy than to skew the upstream market towards vehicles that damage roads and cost a ton of money to repair.

I doubt we'll get there though, I admit that we can't get anything effective done. And we'd need to effectively keep prices from rising at the register to even the playing field for infrastructure expenses.

We need trucks.

We don’t need people in cars.

There is nothing we need but food and shelter, which is not the main payload for those trucks.

While some people might enjoy some of the useless consumerism crap that's moved from China to your closest shopping center via trucks, I enjoy driving my old petrol car through the landscape and to the track.

Now let's all step back, calm down and compromise. :)

We need trucks about as much as we need people in cars.

I would love to see a citation for that as its a very surprising number!

Found it: https://www.gao.gov/products/109954

A couple of caveats: it's from 1979 and deals with interstates only.

You can never win arguments about how you define taxes. If it causes you financial pain it's gonna be felt as a punishment. I think lawmakers and statist types far too often mistake the rationale as 'the good thing we want to do with this money' rather than 'why you as an individual need to pay yet another tax or fee that we could have funded some other way.'

I don't think taxes should be too low and don't mind paying moderate amounts of tax, but I do think the number of taxes should be as low as possible to maintain legitimacy in the population. Nobody likes to feel nickel and dimed to death, so it's better to have a small number of predictable and easy to understand taxes than an endless variety of fees that add up to what feels disproportionately burdensome for the public. Policymakers need to remember that very few of the public are economic rationalists with pocket calculator brains.

> If it causes you financial pain it's gonna be felt as a punishment.

So...when you go to a restaurant and eat, paying feels like a punishment?

When you go to an amusement park, paying the entry fee feels like a punishment?

When you pay for a plane ticket...a new appliance...a movie...?

No, the only reason that "taxes are a punishment (or theft)" is a meme _at all_ is that there are a bunch of entitled, privileged, well-off folks who have decided that they have theirs and they don't want to spend anything that will improve or support society.

I've gone through these arguments a few times, and ... yeah, the naivete on the other side is profound. You're right that I won't "win" an argument with someone who espouses that, or at least I won't convince them of anything, but that's due to them ignoring reality.

In this particular case? A usage fee, for cars, that supports roads, for cars? Seems pretty damned natural-consequences to me. You're paying to use something, not "being punished" in any way.

What a strange and irrational comeback.

Taxes can be a perverse incentive for revenue hungry governments to encourage the taxable behavior.

Wow really?

I have a Tesla in CA and am only familiar with the electric vehicle credit (not sure what it is, I haven't looked into it) and the "you get to use carpool lanes" rule for EVs.

Otherwise, I'm not familiar with extra taxes :(

IIRC, renewing a Tesla registration is $6xx/year whereas renewing a gas car's registration is $1xx/year

Part of the difference is that Tesla is an expensive/new vehicle, and vehicle registration (at least in California) is tied to vehicle cost.

But I think they do charge extra to make up for the fact that you never have to smog an electric vehicle.

There is an additional $100 fee specific to EVs in California and an increasing annual tax.

https://electrek.co/2020/07/10/california-starts-charging-ev...

California's vehicle registration fee factors in several things, the most influential (I think) being price, which is probably why Tesla registration is higher than most gas cars. I've seen $500+ registration fees on ICE trucks.

Because in the states if you didn’t do that a bunch of idiots would accuse you of disproportionately taxing the poor since they can’t afford electric cars. Social justice at its finest.

That argument is fairly common across the political spectrum. Your comment reads far better without the unnecessary and divisive last sentence.

>idiots would accuse you of disproportionately taxing the poor since they can’t afford electric cars.

Are they really idiots if that's the reality of the situation? It's gonna be a long time before EVs are in the beater car price brackets.

It's a short-term / spiteful / envious-response action resulting in long-term harms.

As I've already noted, the complaint is common across the political spectrum. From the Left, it's usually couched as a minority / inequality argument that such policies disadvantage poor minorities. From the right, it's more usually aimed at latte-sipping, college-educated, elitist liberals.

Whilst there's some truth to both portrayals, the underlying reality is that the common weal is served by developing (and trialing) alternative technologies and solutions, and building out necessary infrastructures. If there are inequities that arise out of them, then other taxation and spending parameters can be adjusted to achieve a net-neutral economic impact, or to offer / promote conservation and efficiency options which are better suited to minorities and/or the white / rural poor.

Note that the whole divide-and-conquer tactic is also very often supported at least in part by the interests directly harmed by such initiatives: traditional fossil-fuel powered automobiles, coal producers, and the like. Look beyond the engagement at the front to see what the generals are scheming and whom they're manipulating to their own advantage.

>> disproportionately taxing the poor since they can’t afford electric cars.

There are many layers to this. Rich people, people who own houses, have a better time with electric cars than poor people who rent apartments. Poor people also cannot afford to replace a car every decade. They shy away from tech such as batteries that have life expectancies less than a decade. Certainly few second or third-hand buyers want to purchase a battery pack with only a few years left in it. So the separation between gas an electrics isn't all about sticker price, but it is about money.

More the fact that many states fund road work with a gasoline tax, this makes sense since it's got a decent correlation on how much use somebody gets from the roads. Electrics don't do this so states will come up short as more electrics get adopted otherwise.

My understanding is that road damage scales with the fourth power of the weight over the axle but fuel usage does not scale in the same way. In particular, heavy trucks do the most damage and of consumer cars, electric cars do more damage as they are heavier. Of course the people who most require roads to be constructed tend to be people trying to drive to or from their homes rather than large freight carriers who mostly require maintenance of highways.

It should be based on weight, not the car’s value.

Most of the wear and tear on our roads come from trucks, not passenger cars.

But many electric vehicles weigh a lot.

A tesla model s weighs about as much as a ford f-150.

> One would think that the savings in pollution (not only for the car itself, but the transport of the fuel, pollution from refineries, etc.) would offset any lost revenue from gas taxes.

It does, in social impact sense (gas taxes in the US are universally way too low to cover the impacts).

OTOH, diffuse social benefit doesn't pay for road maintenance, and states have legal and practical requirements for short-run operating budget balance. The right solution would probably be increase general taxation, in a way that misses the low end (e.g., bump income taxes, but not the lowest brackets), to cover the costs.

The ideal would be to dramatically tax petroleum products (at least covering the massive environmental and social costs of air pollution and global climate change from their use), also tax cars (and especially large trucks) in general to fund road maintenance, and (a) distribute the proceeds from petroleum taxes uniformly to every resident, while also (b) better funding public transit, building bicycle/pedestrian infrastructure, etc. This would encourage people to move away from environmentally unsustainable modes of transportation while not unduly harming the poorest.

It's like paying artists in "exposure". There's value, but it doesn't actually pay the bills.

I mean, I think it's OK to charge vehicle owners some kinda usage fee to reflect the cost of congestion, road wear, traffic accidents etc., but it's very poorly implemented as is. An obvious solution seems to be to tax tires which are the dirtiest part of an electric car, need to be replaced moderately regularly but not too often, and which wear down in proportion to the amount and and intensity of use. Offroaders and people who want to do donuts or drive like speed racer will need to replace their tires more often, but taxing tires avoids bureaucratic/administrative overhead.

There are already taxes on tires, but they seem pretty nominal. I think you could hike them substantially (eg to $10 or $20 per tire) without upsetting too many people if you scrapped or reduced some other fee or abolished the necessity for a piece of paperwork.

Edit: as some pointe dout the real wear comes from trucks an dother big commercial vehicles. Tires are already taxed by vehicle weight class, but I'm proposing increasing the fees for that in order to simplify bureaucracy elsewhere.

Honestly I think it should be collected by insurance companies. You’re legally required to have it in basically all states so they’re effectively an arm of the gov’t, (and the BMV can collect it if you go the self-insurance route since you have to put up a cash deposit) plus your insurance company needs to know roughly how much you drive your car and so can charge proportionally.

car insurance is optional in some countries like NZ

You could have something similar to dyed diesel for tires, where, say, orange tires are untaxed and can only be used on private property/off-road, and regular tires can be used on public roadways.

Tires last too long to make this practical, I think. Let's say a set of tires lasts 30,000 miles. California's current gas tax is 67c/gallon. Let's assume a very efficient 40 mpg. That's 1.6 cents / mile. You'd need a $500 tax on a set of tires to compensate. if you did that, though, you'd need to prevent people from importing tires from other states, which is tricky to do.

You could have a special "California tyre" which has a state approved logo on the side, and require all cars registered in the state use them.

They could be designed to last however many miles the state likes by putting more or less tread on them. And have a very obvious marker they are worn out so police can easily give tickets for people driving on worn out tyres.

It would have to be a per-year or per-mile tax, or else you will end up with safety issues when people avoid buying new tires (as you say, $500 more)

The way Sweden and other countries do this is through a car ownership tax, where things like address road usage, traffic accidents, state own parking and other aspects get funded. Gasoline is then taxed independently, so when people buy a electric car they still pay the car ownership tax. On top of those are congestion and road tolls.

Last time someone on HN discussed the Australia law I asked if Australia had a car ownership tax. It seems that they do, but that the money isn't enough to support road maintenance. Seems the easy answer to the new Australia law would be to increase the car ownership tax, lower the gasoline tax to match the increase, and then you don't need a special law for electric cars. No need to reinvent the wheel.

UK is similar, except roads are upkept from general taxes, for all road users, including cyclists, pedestrians, and of course horses (it’s the UK after all). Plus car ownership tax, and petrol tax.

It’s the common erroneous argument of angry drivers against cyclists: get off my road, you’re not paying for it.

General taxes is the big alternative. When the sum from petrol tax goes down you need to fill in the missing difference in the budget. Electric car owners don't feel targeted by general taxes. Taxing the fuel was a decent way in the past to move the taxation closer to the party that utilized the roads, but in the future we will need to find a different way.

As a side note about angry drivers, I actively try to avoid being angry with cyclists. They have to be outside in the rain and cold, while inside the car it's pretty nice. I can wait.

> As a side note about angry drivers, I actively try to avoid being angry with cyclists. They have to be outside in the rain and cold, while inside the car its pretty nice. I can wait.

Thank you!

In the UK tax is paid explicitly per car, in tiers of engine size (for passenger cars) and I should assume emissions / weight for commercial vehicles. Petrol is heavily taxed (by US standards), but that’s everywhere in the continent.

I like the idea of taxing tyres, as it explicitly taxes mileage and pollution. Would it create weird incentives? People running on tyres too long to avoid the tax? Reusing old, more polluting tyres?

Maybe we should just tax on mileage. In fact why not at the pump/charging station...

I was under that impression that it _might_ be the case that tire/brake dust pollution was misdirection started by the oil/gas industry? Anyone more informed than me know the real answer to this?

California is looking at a road usage charge. Longer term, as gas tax revenue drops, it seems inevitable. And other jurisdictions will do the same.

https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtm...

I have both an electric car and a Chevy Silverado 4x4 truck. My electric car has a $450 registration fee every year. My truck is only $130.

Electric cars still create huge amounts of pollution when made, micro plastics from tires, and require ridiculous roads that plague the country.

Australia is also still lagging behind in its vehicle emissions standards[0][1].

[0]: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/nov/16/wrong-tu...

[1]: https://theconversation.com/australias-car-industry-ignored-...

They need to get taxed somehow (they still use public roads after all). Just build it in to registration costs. Yearly inspection takes the odometer, charge based off km at registration time. No need to over complicate it.

That's exactly what they're (planning on) implementing at a rate of 2.5 cents/km

Interesting - I haven’t read that. I wonder how it will work for PHEVs

The Aussie politicians have made it very clear who is lining their pockets.

It's impossible to exemplify the truth of that statement more clearly than this: The current Australian Prime Minister, who was Treasurer at the time, brought a lump of coal into Parliamentary Question Time[0].

[0]: https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2017/feb/09/scott...

Sure, in Victoria. In other states we have incentives pushing for them.

Where can I read about that?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com