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Comment by aaomidi | Hacker News Reader

Agreedish. In the US I don’t think I’d support higher taxes for non EVs because cars are unfortunately a necessity here and EVs are (mostly artificially through govt policy) expensive.

But yes to your point of ICE cars suck. They’re so much more impressive engineering than EVs but that complexity is also their downfall imo.

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Could still tax based on weight to encourage people buying smaller cars. That’s how it works in many places.

I would be 100% in favor of this.

>Tax based on weight

Ooooohhhhh and that just makes all the EVs more expensive than they already are.

This is part of the reason why vehicles need to also be taxes based on pollution. But road-wear needs to be compensated too. It's worth mentioning that in the US, plenty of ICE vehicles weigh more than a typical EV. Honda Pilot, Toyota Sienna, etc.. etc...

Gas is already taxed.

Well. Yes but gas tax also goes for road maintenance which EVs don’t pay. Some states have increased the registration fees for EVs to counter this.

Almost all states with significant EV adoption have a special charge for EVs each year. What sucks is that it isn’t based on how much you drive, so if you aren’t using your EV to commute, you get charged just as much as someone using it all day for ride sharing.

Charging based on usage would require you to provide your mileage to the government, a tracker in your car, or some other privacy destroying method. I guess the government could just ask for your mileage and take your word for it, but that isn't reliable.

Car inspections that happen in most states do take count of your mileage fwiw I believe. However I also don't think charging based on "usage" makes sense here. Due to the jobs some people have, you may need to just drive a ton more and roads will need to be maintained either way however much you drive.

It’s coming eventually, once enough of the cars are EVs, flat fees aren’t going to be very viable if they don’t want people to game them. It’s not hard to read an odometer, it is hard to say where those miles were accumulated f you want to be really fare and get tax revenue to the state/place you were driving in.

In rural Ohio, the Amish use the roads for their buggies, but don’t pay tax. Wonder if they have registration fees for their buggies? I’ve never seen one with plates.

The gas taxes haven’t kept pace with inflation, though: we already have to heavily subsidize road maintenance with general fund revenue and to be an effective pollution reduction mechanism we’d have to raise it considerably, which is politically infeasible in most of the country.

Are evs taxed for road maintenance given they are much heavier?

Increasingly, so, and doing it by gross vehicle weight is the most fair since it also covers the guys buying heavy pickups as daily commuters.

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