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Comment by sircastor | Hacker News Reader

Every time my insurance renews they try to sell me on plugging something into my OBD2 port so they can gather data on my driving. That’s a hard pass. My insurance has gone up quite a lot, but this is something I don’t want to compromise on.

Adjacent to this, in my state I can save ~ $200 on my EV registration if I plug in a tracking dongle to read mileage. For some reason, just reading the odometer difference is not enough.

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Odometer scams were a big thing before it was digital and I'm sure someone has a mod-chip style thing for EV cars if there is money involved. Also solves issues of if you sell the car, car gets totaled, stolen, etc, they will still know. It could also enable monthly registrations fees which may be better for some people than a $600+ once a year vs $50/mo if it's all electronic.

there is nothing in place that prohibits that form of monthly registration that a plug-in dongle is going to provide.

If there's a mod chip why wouldn't you just modify the OBD tracking device? You can wire up a complete simulated OBD interface with a microcontroller and don't even need a car attached to it.

If it validates against an accelerometer, you’re going to find it difficult.

But could possibly put the OBD thingamajig in grandma’s Corolla but MiTM your Ferrari’s VIN to it.

I have yet to hear a good explanation of why the odometer isn't sufficient. Either the cost to manually read is outrageous or there's nefarious secondary purpose.

Any schlub can slip the tech at your autoshop a $20 to misread the odometer. Need more work to fake a digital reading.

This is all around the bigger issue here is how we fund road work: often it's done with a state tax on gasoline sales, so the more you use the roads the more you pay for them. Worked great, reasonably fair, even somewhat punished heavier vehicles (road wear is something more-than-linear to weight, and heavier cars generally need more gas). And then those pesky non-gas electrics came onto the scene.

So you now you have a system and a bureaucracy funded by a not-terrible pay-as-you-go tax, and suddenly lots of users don't need the thing your taxing. What's a bureaucracy to do?

Well, if you're in a state that thinks EV's are woke propaganda and an existential threat to your truck-based manliness, simple: you charge absurd annual registration fees and say "well, we gotta get the equivalent road tax somehow, so lets do it all at once upfront and ignore any of the equity talk about turning a pay-as-you-go into a massive flat upfront fee because only libtards care about equity."

Other states say "alright alright, we can split this registration fee into 4 quarterly installments" and they deal with the extra paperwork of now "keeping your registration up to date" is much more complicated.

No sympathies for Orwellian government-must-observe-your-odometer all the time, but I also see how it's a bureaucracy that was built around one system that worked ok struggling to adapt to a new technology.

>Well, if you're in a state that thinks EV's are woke propaganda

The opposite is true. Washington state has the highest EV registration fee in the nation and the governor ran on a platform of climate change.

Or they can just do what Georgia does and charge an insane yearly fee from non-gas vehicles. GA charges 29.10 cent gas tax, and my Model Y "Alternative Fuel Vehicle Fee" is $210 yearly. I would need to buy an equivalent 721 gallons of gas yearly to match that fee, which is over 20k miles a year on a gas car (assuming 30mpg).

It gets weirder. In my state (Oregon) it's not even the government that is gathering the data, it's a third party that's authorized by the government. I assume the government gets that data, but I also assume that the 3rd party is happily allowed to correlated and package the data to sell how it sees it (that may not be fair, but there were no explicit statements of privacy safety on the sites...)

There are 3 companies that do it. Only one of them will do a non-GPS-based system, but it still requires a dongle plugged in and is limited to a small set of vehicles. I'm not really sure why.

To further complicate things, do I choose the Insurance dongle to save money on insurance, or the EV registration dongle, to save money on vehicle registration? AFAICT, they don't stack.

Can’t we just tax tyres instead of gas?

My insurance just asks me for a picture of my odometer once a year.

There has to be a better way to tax road usage. I pay extra for my EV as well, but I suppose the state’s argument is that the odometer reading could include mileage in other states. But that would still benefit your home state… so I don’t know.

My state requires a check for all vehicles older than 4 years which includes a obd2 scan, so they probably already have this data

They should go after SUVs. They weigh as much (or more), use far more gas, obliterate anything they crash into (smaller cars and pedestrians), and they get a fucking IRS tax deduction.

Doubly for EV SUVs.

New York State gives EVs and plugin EVs discounts on tolls (and maybe reg fees), but looking at the list, some of the SUVs have an eMPG in the 40s.

Meanwhile your non-plugin Corolla Hybrid, doesn’t get a discount, gets a 50mpg mileage.

And those plugin SUVs can drop to under 25mpg (some under 20!) if you don’t plug them in.

https://www.nyserda.ny.gov/All-Programs/Drive-Clean-Rebate-F...

https://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/PowerSearch.do?action=noform...

you know most SUVs are really sedans with tall cabins? All crossovers are sedan unibody chassis. Here is a list of truck SUVs, which have actual frames.

https://www.motorbiscuit.com/which-2022-suvs-built-on-truck-...

I agree SUVs are wasteful in general, but EVs are actually pretty heavy too!

> There has to be a better way to tax road usage.

There is, tax vehicles based on weight. The EV advocates don't seem to like this idea however.

They should like the idea: when properly designed, EVs don't weight more than ICE peers.

Take the latest Model 3 Performance: 4054 pounds, 296 miles on a charge. The 2024 BMW M3? 3840 pounds.

The Tesla beats the BMW on every metric and has plenty of range. Yet, it weighs less than 5% more than the BMW hybrid.

You can also compare the standard Model 3 with the 3 series, or the Model Y with the X3. Weigh is not an issue any more and specific energy of new batteries keep getting better. We're only started.

The whole premise of tracking usage is bogus. The point of public goods is that we can’t value individual benefit or prevent free riders so we publicly fund them. Roads are the quintessential public good.

Think about it this way. If you never leave your house you’re still using roads. All your goods are delivered via truck. Your trash is hauled away via roads, your mail is delivered. Home repairs need roads to access your house.

There’s no way your road trip in your Kia is putting more wear on the roads than all of those things.

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