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Comment by riantogo | Hacker News Reader

The other day I was driving through a school zone and it had that 25 mph radar screen. Most people did slow down, but it got me thinking. With modern cars being "smart", could govt offer a tax tax break for folks opting into the car sotware capping speeds dynamically?

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This might be in the works already: with hybrids + full electric vehicles being increasingly used, the revenue from a fuel tax is dropping. There are regions investigating use-based taxes that track when and where vehicles are used, and assess a tax based on that information.

This is, of course, a frightening proposal for anyone who wants to keep even one shred of privacy, but so it goes ....

There's a lot of interesting ways to do usage based vehicle tax that don't impact privacy or do so only minimally.

The simplistic is to just bin roads into N categories and every mile it increments your monthly usage category N road type. The categories could be anything like road type, time of day, current congestion level, etc. There's actually little reason to track the specific location or road name.

> There's actually little reason to track the specific location or road name.

Yet, so many reasons for several government agencies to do exactly that.

My exact thoughts, although I would’ve been more blunt…

"Do you have anything to hide" is one of the worst sentences in existence.

It wouldn't need to share any data with anyone, just have dynamic speed control depending on the road someone is driving. Storing data for all 6 million km of road locally and refreshing them regularly should be doable.

But I pay taxes for energy already? Why should I pay to charge and then again to drive?

Governments are already considering or in the process of mandating that cars be equipped with automatic speed limiters. It's long overdue.

There's no way that's a good idea without a AZ-5 style wax+paper seal and flip cap on the steering wheel to turn it off. You want to be able to use your car in emergency situations.

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