All cars could be fitted with black box trackers under new tax plans

Separately, I can't help but wonder if there's some overlap with V2X https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle-to-everything

Many countries have already allocated spectrum for it, and it's supposedly in all new cars (anyone chime in?). The report has left out implementation details because that depends on how the Govt would want to do the data capture, but I hope motorists don't get a bunch of additional devices piled on... I might be thinking too much in terms of software development but I'm always looking for efficiency in reuse.

The quote is for a report into "road pricing" [1] by which they seem to mean mean pricing individual roads, rather than roads collectively.

Right now, the country has a variety of toll roads, toll tunnels, toll bridges, congestion charge zones, low emission zones and suchlike. They can have complex pricing schemes - higher for more polluting vehicles, free at evenings and weekends, free for wheelchair users, higher during rush hour, free for taxis and busses. Dozens of schemes across the country have different ways of paying - and often the money goes to local, rather than national, government.

So I think a mileage tax was not in the scope of the report. This was a report specifically asking "what if all roads were toll roads?"

[1] https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm5802/cmselect/cmtran...

Indeed. It doesn't allow differential pricing per road type. Driving 10 miles through London is almost certainly worse than 10 miles down a country a road in terms of impact. Is that something worth giving up everyone's privacy? I personally don't think so, and I'm not even particularly privacy conscious.

Might that be more open to fraud than a telematic solution? Doubtful. Those people who would attempt to commit fraud that way will be just as likely to do so otherwise.

That seems like a 99% solution, but the farmers or amateur racers who put mileage on their cars outside of public roads might be annoyed by that solution. Same with people who spent a lot of time driving outside of the UK.

But based on the privacy implications of the other approach, I'd much prefer yours, maybe with a way to submit documentation of off-road/out-of-country miles.

A problem with annual milage is annual tax. How many people are planning for a 4 figure tax bill? Gas tax is per fill and built in.

Agreed - although remember the MOT only starts once the car is there years old. There is no MOT for the first few years.

Also, and more of an edge case, there are some vehicles that don't require an MOT, such as vintage vehicles (which also don't pay VED) and don't public sector fleets (such as police cars)

Most of the point of road pricing is to charge (much) more At places and times where traffic is congested, so traffic flows well 24/7 and we don't have to keep adding lanes and freeways eternally for the non paying traffic.

The report calls for pricing to be dynamic based on time/congestion and take into account geography - a straight annual mileage report would not allow for this.

> every year

New cars don't have to be taken for MOT for several years. After buying a car you don't need to even take it to a mechanic for the first two or so.

I guess the plan would be to base pricing in such a way that it will incentivise good behaviour? For example, a journey distance of 1 mile or less could be made so expensive that people choose to walk instead.

Presumably the goal is to also reduce congestion, by having variable rate tolling that charges more for driving at high demand times and less for low demand times.

They never heard of toll roads?

> Worth baring in mind we in the UK have one of the most extensive ANPR (automatic number plate recognition) camera networks in the world.

Second only to China actually. That goes for cameras in general.

What a worthy adversary for #1.

Not to mention the enormous abuses with ANPR. It seems like it's mostly used to harass political dissidents. Tommy Robinson was routinely stopped and questioned by police.

Sure, nobody in their right mind likes Tommy Robinson, but targetted harassment by the police definitely isn't okay either.

I wasn't aware of this system. That made for some uncomfortable reading.

They had a capacity for 50 million daily number plate reads in 2006.

So what then, we should just refuse to object and install cameras in our toilet bowls for their amusement?

And when it's possible to track what they think, they won't be allowed to think.

It's difficult to read sentiment and know whether you're being sarcastic or not so please take no offense from my tone, but this is the complete opposite of "beautiful" - it is the first steps in turning humans into units of production with every action being optimized for you and leaving little to no individual freedom.

It's communism 2.0 except the government doesn't only dictate production quotas but also "life quotas." It's an absolute nightmare and seeing what a spectacular failure communism 1.0 was, everyone should be more than freaking out about this.

plebs have no say in political matters. You will be getting #3, plus a full cavity search annually, guaranteed.

Who would have saw this coming? /s

I for one will not be installing a black box in my car, it's my right as a private individual to travel freely without informing the government about where I've been. I'll rip it out or put it in a lead box if I have to. I think COVID tracking has finally gone to their heads.

Another one to watch is green energy - it is currently heavily subsidized by fossil fuel taxes, so when everybody finally uses green energy they will lose tax income and the cost of green energy will increase for maintenance and future projects.

And as always, it is the poorest tax payers that ultimately pay the largest bills. They will be left with the largest road tax bill as they wait for a proper second-hand EV market to emerge, then will never see the tax break of owning an EV. They will be the last to adopt green energy, and will pay the most for it.

Politicians are completely removed from the decisions they make. In their mind everybody lives like a toff they rub shoulders with in central London. But, as they will learn, you can only push the working class so far. History is filled with peasant revolts.

The disadvantage of taxing based on fuel is that it mostly benefits newer cars, generally owned by the richer groups in society. People barely able to afford a car are hit by a pollution tax they can hardly work around, because it's either "pay the fuel tax" or "get another job", and despite the so-called labour shortage, that's not as easy as it seems if you're not educated.

In terms of taxing pollution the Dutch system is actually quite reasonable, because there's barely any green energy being produced in the country compared to the old fossil fuel plants. All that "green" electricity is just a piece of paper that says the joules come from some hydro plant in Norway, but they don't actually come from a green source, of course. If you can charge your car by solar panels, you'll be much better off.

Taxing by distance actually taxes road use rather than fuel exhaustion, which is a much better way to tax for road maintenance in my opinion. The heavy electric cars do a much bigger number on the roads than grandma's city car from twenty years ago.

In an optimal system, both taxes would be combined and balanced. However, the government has shown that it will abuse any data it collects for other purposes, and balancing things isn't one of the government's strong suits either. It's sad, really.

>Gasoline cars already pay tax per mile, as gas is very heavily taxed. Electric cars do too, as electricity is also taxed pretty heavily.

In the UK, electricity is taxed at an effective rate of approximately €2 per TJ, whereas diesel and gasoline for transportation purposes are taxed more like €18-20 per TJ.

It seems pretty clear that that a large-scale switch to EVs is going to cause a pretty large tax hole unless something is done about it.

It means you can tax car usage more heavily than would be the case if you just taxed their electricity consumption at the same rate as electricity used for other purposes (like home lighting and heating), in a way analogous to how in the UK petrol and diesel used by cars is taxed much more heavily than petrol used for other purposes (eg heating, or agricultural vehicles). This is useful because it discourages heavy use of private vehicles and especially of inefficient ones (compare the UK or Europe to US car usage, culture, and vehicle preferences -- I can't help thinking US cheap gasoline is relevant there).

In the UK, petrol is taxed much more heavily than electricity currently is, incidentally.

But mostly this is about the fact that currently petrol and diesel taxes bring in a lot of money, so if we don't shift that onto "extra taxes on electric vehicles" then there's going to have to be a rise in general taxation -- which is generally not popular.

Do they not already have even better data via mobile networks?

I am in the US and I assume the government has access to my location history to however accurate mobile networks are at any time, because I always have my phone on me.

The UK is already a surveillance state. Cameras on every corner with sophisticated software to identify license plates and piece the data together. So the movement of people is already being tracked.

As for the cost of doing so? I would guess its already very cheap and only getting cheaper.

The potential for taxation is just a more presentable way of selling such a plan. Saying “we want to track your every movement” isn’t yet palatable. In another 10 years and some overhyped criminal incident later, it might be, though.

I would think a main benefit would be that fewer roads need to be built and maintained. That’s serious cost cutting. Lower congestion also can be a huge gain.

Also, from what I understand the tracking already is somewhat solved in London.

The point is what to do when electric cars are the norm and there is no fuel tax to pay for road maintenance?

> ~75% of the petrol price in the UK already is basically tax (fuel duty + VAT), and even more if you add indirect taxes too.

it’s close to 0% tax if you’re using an electric car. which is why governments around the world are trying to figure this thing out.