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Comment by richjdsmith | Hacker News Reader

With the continued shift to EVs, petrol taxes just don't make sense as a form of taxation to pay for roads. I think we should be shifting entirely to a gross curb weight tax for all vehicles. The fourth power law states that the greater the axle load of a vehicle, the stress on the road caused by the motor vehicle increases in proportion to the fourth power of the axle load. Meaning heavier EVs cough hummer, are doing x^4 damage over my already heavy car.

Capturing vehicle taxes by weight should incentivize lighter vehicles, and therefore, less tire wear.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_power_law

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The Ford F150 is the best selling car in the US by a long-shot and it's a gas guzzler. Given that, I don't think consumers care a lot about how much they pay in taxes when deciding on a vehicle to purchase.

I don't think this'd have the incentive that you're suggesting it would unless something else is done, such as increasing the tax overall.

The most popular F150s are significantly less gas guzzling than my 2005 sedan that I replaced with an F150. Not to mention that my F150 is more capable in winter conditions (major importance in Michigan) and more capable for the DIY stuff I do (I actually do regularly get lumber, plywood, drywall and other things that only fit in the 8ft bed that I actually bought). All while using less gas... Efficiency has gone up markedly in the 13 years between that 2005 and the 2018 F150 I bought. The weird thing is that you can get an F150 with significantly better real world mileage than an Escape, which is massively smaller, lighter, more aerodynamic, etc. Consumers are smarter than you're giving them credit for here.

A new F150 is getting 19 city / 24 highway, while ten year old Prius are getting more than double that at 45mpg. Every single trip you make in an F150 without lumber is more than double the gas guzzling than current state of the art. New Prius are 57mpg and AWD. And I've fit tons of plywood, furniture, and even a 50 gal. water heater in my Prius.

Not to mention how dangerous these large trucks like the F150 are to pedestrians. It's a real shame vehicles like this have been normalized.

And for things that don't fit in a Prius, you can get / borrow / rent a small trailer.

I get 40 to 50 MPG from my Diesel Chevette, 25 to 30 MPG towing, and it can tow more than it weighs.

How so? The 2023 models of the F150 seem to get about 17.19 MPG [0] which is significantly worse than the 32.34 MPG [1] of the 2023 Escape.

[0] https://www.fuelly.com/car/ford/f-150/2023

[1] https://www.fuelly.com/car/ford/escape/2023

> as a form of taxation to pay for roads

at least in the US, and i believe most countries, gas taxes haven't really paid for roads for a long time. Gas taxes go into the general fund, and road maintenance and construction comes out of the general fund, but gas taxes cover less than half the cost of roads.

Just let’s please not require a government-approved mileage tracking device to make sure that each vehicle is charged it’s fair share. That’s one really nice property of gas taxes they will be hard to replace without going full dystopia, and there is a significant contingent that doesn’t give a shit about the privacy and security implications.

Every car already has a way to track its own mileage without requiring GPS

Not all states require periodic inspections. Who will be checking those odometers? Is it the honor system or are we requiring a third party inspection?

All 50 states will adopt them if federal highway funding becomes contingent on having them.

They should require periodic inspections. Too many vehicles here are too dangerous for public roads, and having bald tires, no brakes, and rusted out suspension just makes them worse.

In Oregon, there are two metro areas (Portland and Medford) where vehicles must be tested because of air pollution concerns. If you have a pre-2005 vehicle, I'm pretty sure they still use a measuring device to see how many pollutants your car generates. For model year 2005 and later, they hook their computer to your car's OBDII port and ask the car's computer how it's feeling. If the computer says "fine", they pass you and you can renew your registration.

Comparatively recently, they let mechanics and quick change oil places do the test for 2005 and later cars, giving them the option of charging a fee for it.

Oregon doesn't have vehicle safety inspections but it doesn't seem unreasonable that I could go to the official DEQ or DMV locations if I wanted to have my mileage inspected or maybe pay Jiffy Lube a bit extra because they're closer and their hours are more convenient.

The issue with that is that, though, is the same problem with taxes: many (most?) people aren't going to want to come up with the money to pay their mileage bill on the spot. There don't seem to be great answers for that.

Oregon has a pilot program where they put a device in your car and charge your credit card 1.9 cents per mile. https://www.myorego.org I'm sure that's what they'd like to have people do but I don't know how many people want to do that.

Not every state has inspections. So the infrastructure to check/validate odometer readings is lacking.

Maybe some yearly assertion of mileage and random selection rate yearly would suffice.

All you need to do is require people to report their odometer reading when they renew their vehicle registration, and have huge penalties for willful mis-reporting. Traffic stops and service records at tire shops, oil change places, etc. provide plenty of evidence to prosecute someone, and if the penalties are severe enough, the threat of enforcement will be enough to keep most people honest.

I remember replacing the worm gear on my odometer and wondering how many miles were "lost" from it while it wasn't turning during those 6 months or so that I was getting around to the project.

Not that I'm advocating a Orwellian tracking system be installed. Just saying I can see how existing systems could be argued against.

A tire tax would also work, except for the unfortunate safety implications.

Yup. The second order effects are tricky. Gas tax was an elegant solution that will not be easy to replace.

It would most likely hurt the working class more than anyone else.

Yeah, my car should be tracked by its manufacturer, my cell carrier, my phone, the mapping software in my GPS, the four random apps I gave location permission to and forgot about, the traffic cameras, my neighbor's door cameras, but god forbid the government actually trying to reduce pollution by getting a raw distance number once a year.

You'd just have a self reporting system which is then periodically corrected by vehicle inspections. If you underreport you'll end up paying it all back in the future at a likely higher rate than the present rate.

I keep seeing people bringing this up, but what this misses is that a significant portion of road construction and maintenance costs are not due to damage from tires, but other factors like weather (especially freeze/thaw cycles) and the need to widen roads to accommodate the amount of space cars take up while driving.

I support the idea of factoring in axle load to any future road use tax, but it's definitely not the only factor or even necessarily the biggest one.

Isn't the proper tax on tires? The more you shed, the faster they need replacement. So cars which shed a lot of microplastics would both use up more tires, AND would pay more tax. So as the tax increases we correctly linearly decrease tire use.

It would be a mistake to over-punish EV users compared to ICE just because the average weight of an EV is heavier. (We know the weights, we don't need to average by class)

This would reward companies for inventing tech which would wear our fewer tires, leading to less pollution.

This is two different things though.

Road use tax is intended to be used to pay for road maintenance and infrastructure. It's why if you live on a farm you can get tax-free diesel that is dyed red. You aren't using the road/infrastructure, so you shouldn't need to pay the tax.

If the goal is to reduce tire microplastics, the tax should be specifically based on tire lifespan, which is already well known. It's called UTQG.

Today we tend to conflate tax on pollution and tax on infrastructure though, since gas guzzler cars use much more gas (and cause more pollution, theoritically, all else equal) than the wear on the roads themselves. If this was truly about taxing externalities, it would be 3 taxes. Tax based on weight, tax based on efficiency, and tax based on tire tread life.

>Today we tend to conflate tax…

Today we conflate supplying more of our earnings to the government and solutions to problems.

The alternative being government restrictions or bans on 'high particulate' tires or something of that nature, if the aim is to fix tire dust.

Which of the two seems more feasible? An outright ban, or an economic incentive that encourages consumers to choose lower particulate tires which thereby applies economic pressure to tire companies?

Do you have a constructive alternative you would like to propose?

Then you get a lot of people keeping their old tires far longer than is safe and creating hazardous conditions. Gas tax is different in that regard.

Agree, but that has already happened. Tires already have tax on them, which makes people replace them somewhat less, since they balance the equation cost vs risk from worn tires, particularly very large scale users like taxi companies, rental fleets, trucking companies etc. We already accept the tradeoff of for example, charging 10% sales tax on tires in return for slightly more accidents.

My point is that we might be able to rebalance it more correctly by raising prices. There could be significant pressure to reduce pollution from wear technically, pressure to drive less, but also pressure to keep tires on carts slightly longer. Given that we're still making the equation more accurate, it would still be a net gain.

You can't just say "don't do that" without also explaining why you do not advocate removing sales tax on tires, or even having negative sales tax (to incentivize more frequent & safe tire replacement). Status quo is not really a defense.

What about brake dust? That's a big problem too, and curb weight tax wouldn't help because EV mostly use regen braking[0].

Also, some tires and brakes emit far less than others[O], so it would be much better to tax by level of non-exhaust emissions (just like CO2/km).

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9178796/

Texas is applying an annual surcharge on EV registrations of $200/year (as a dual EV family in Texas, I can't disagree with the logic)

That's the same tax someone would pay for 1000 gallons of gas. A typical 25 mpg car driven a typical number of miles will use more like 600 gallons a year. The Texas EV tax is deliberately high.

> With the continued shift to EVs, petrol taxes just don't make sense as a form of taxation to pay for roads.

In New Zealand soon EVs will face Road User Charges, which mean they pay a per km tax as all diesel vehicles do today. The tax is based on the class of vehicle and so EVs won't be charged more than a diesel cars.

Unfortunately the RUC in New Zealand is strongly regressive, with massive subsidies for heavy vehicles.

New Zealand plans to charge road user charges for EVs next year AFAIK. This is a per km tax, though don't believe it has a weight consideration

All vehicles in NZ pay road user charges; EVs have just been exempt to encourage uptake. There are RUC weight classes but they only exist to separate light (<3500kg) and heavy (>=3500kg) vehicles rather than distinguish between a Nissan Leaf (1600kg) and a Ford Ranger (2100kg).

Uh, no. All non-petrol powered vehicles pay road user charges.

For petrol vehicles we tax the petrol instead. This is because the cost of compliance is much cheaper (for the government and the car owner) if we tax the petrol. We don't do that for desil vehicles because a large about of desil is used by farm equipment and other off road vehicles. It's easier to do road user charges than to have a refund scheme for desil taxes.

Why not just tax tires?

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