US bill proposes new national EV tax, while some push to slash gas tax to zero
electrek.co
electrek.co
- The federal gas tax is low and unchanged. States have their own gas taxes in addition that do go up and have done so a lot in the last several decades.
- The current compromise is to collect it once at a federal level and split the proceeds with the states. This has problems, but it's better than having every state track individual mileage on public roads (ew).
- Gas tax goes towards more than just fixing road damage - it's pretty essential in funding public transit and road infrastructure in general.
- Obviously EVs currently account for a small fraction of road use right now, but they mostly drive on dense, urban infrastructure - the most expensive to build and maintain.
- As EVs inevitably grow in popularity, this will have to be solved eventually anyway.
There are probably a million things we could debate about with the proposed infrastructure bill. But Electek's increasingly toxic coverage of these topics is not doing EVs in general any favors.
“Has problems” is an interesting way to gloss over we’ve got an administration that has openly declared war on any state he didn’t win and will no doubt withhold funds from the states he doesn't like, the same ones that will be providing the vast majority of the revenue in question.
I literally cannot think of a worse way to enforce this than letting the federal government collect the tax and then distribute it to the states as they see fit.
I mean, this is more or less how it already works with all the federal department funding. The same administration wants to abolish the Department of Education which is guilty of the same thing. So no side is really being consistent in this particular area.
The democrats have consistently tried to pass bills and funding for the needy regardless of political affiliation or state of residence. Trump is literally the only one trying to use the federal government to punish states that didn’t vote for him and his Republican colleagues have been happy to oblige.
Which is why it's bad to add to that.
> The same administration wants to abolish the Department of Education which is guilty of the same thing. So no side is really being consistent in this particular area.
I'm not aware of a time where DoE was used as a political cudgel against specific states, care to elaborate here?
That DoE can allogate disproportionately from wealthier states to poorer states based on need isn't the issue. The issue is when it's based on spite.
Obviously nobody has weaponized these agencies like Trump. But it's worth pointing out that the way DoE funds have been doled out over the years have been deferential and usually follow each administrations' pet projects.
It's a fair criticism to have over a national EV road tax as well, but it's not that unusual a precedent.
- Gas tax goes towards more than just fixing road damage
This is really just a tax on leaving the stone age.
Especially given that my nissan leaf weights a little more than 1/2 of what an escalade weighs. It's purely just another disincentive to electrify, brought to you by the burn baby burn lobby.
The US has become the seed state of global idiocracy.
Why is this relevant? Aside from your “polemics”, I mean.
> Obviously EVs currently account for a small fraction of road use right now, but they mostly drive on dense, urban infrastructure - the most expensive to build and maintain.
I suppose if it’s a small fraction of that then this all makes perfect sense. What is the specific fraction they should be funding then, and why is the federal government the right group to collect it? Or are we just making excuses for politics we like?
> As EVs inevitably grow in popularity, this will have to be solved eventually anyway.
So now is a good time? Why?
Is it the most expensive by $/length of road, or by $/(vehicle * travel distance)?
Gas taxes provide the revenue that help pay for road maintenance and the rest of the infrastructure that cars use. Gas taxes made sense -- the more you drive, the more you chip in to keep the road system going.
That infrastructure still needs to exist, and will still cost money to maintain -- but if fewer people are buying gas, then the funds will dry up, even as usage stays relatively the same.
> Yes, and they have been for a few years now.
Apparently they're 1.9% of all vehicles currently on the road, do you consider that to be "that widespread"? I was aiming for 51%.
> I don’t know of a state that doesn’t charge higher tab fees for EVs in 2026
That doesn't mean EVs are widespread, it just means states want to favor ICEs more than EVs.
There’s a map here: https://www.ncsl.org/transportation/special-registration-fee...
Looks like most of the northeast, plus AK, FL, AZ, NM, and NV are in the same boat.
Rather than indirectly taxing via fuel it would be more proper to do so by said maintenance scalar (weight based) and the distance driven as the inputs. Presumably paid at the time of registration renewal or at vehicle inspections.
That sounds like a lot of infra change to setup, so there should be plenty of planning and cutover time.
The current model is roughly that all of society shoulders the cost roughly equally per person, regardless of how much they use that road or how much they drive in general. But clearly, some people derive more benefit from the road than others. The guy who doesn't drive derives 0 units of benefit. The gal who drives on it once a year derives 1 unit of benefit. The daily commuter gets 100 units of benefit. For the trucker moving $10M of goods a year on that road, their company gets 3000 units of benefit. So in a sense, the people who drive less are subsidizing the people who drive more - kind of like going to a fixed-price buffet dinner (people who eat more are subsidized by people who eat less).
Targeting more of the cost burden on heavy goods vehicles isn't an issue in my opinion. The thing is, that highway costs $1M no matter what. The only thing we can decide as a society is how to split that cost among the people. In the current way, I think the truck is underpriced and is doing more than its fair share of damage. If we change the prices so that car drivers pay less (not zero) and the truck driver pays more, that's okay. The truck's costs get passed onto consumer, such that people who buy more goods pay more road tax - exactly as intended.
Taking a step back, I think a lot of (not all) problems in society are a result of mispricing - often for political, special-interest, and/or "feel-good" reasons. When people pay less than the true cost, they over-consume. When people pay more than the true cost, they under-consume.
If that results in taxing semi and heavy duty trucks, that may be a good thing. A lot of the wear & tear on highways comes from trucking; if it shifts a lot of that truck traffic to rail, it likely would significantly reduce the total cost to society.
Washington has a gas tax of 55.6 cents per gallon. The tax on 405 gallons of gas in Washington is $225
Average mileage driven in US looks to be around 14,000 miles (plus or minus 500 miles), which means you’d need a car that averages 34.5 miles per gallon to pay less in gasoline tax than you’d pay in EV tax.
So that’s $364 per year for 14k miles. Vs. the $225 currently paid as an electrification fee.
[1] WA gas tax $0.554 (Federal gas tax is an additional $0.184. California is $0.7092.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_taxes_in_the_United_State...
[2] Average fuel efficiency 25.4 mpg. https://gocarlife.com/average-gas-mileage-for-a-car/
[3] 10,952 average passenger + light duty miles driven per year. https://truedrivingcost.com/articles/how-many-miles-american...
A better tax like others are suggesting based on mileage, weight, or usage (tolls) would have to apply to all road users, and require more rules and enforcement and be more difficult.
Realistically tires and brakes are already subject to sales taxes and are not subject to review at annual vehicle inspections. We probably should enforce that cars on the roads have working brakes and tires but that’s seemingly beside the point of how we pay for the maintenance of the roads.
Asking them to maximise roadway capacity (that’s to say just one more lane bro) in order to solve congestion, at the explicit request to have other modes of transport minimised. “recover roadway capacity from other purposes to support driving” because that’ll solve congestion. Deeply, deeply unserious.
US drivers average 13,476 miles (across gender / age groups).
So currently gas tax is ~$101.07 (for "cars", more for light trucks.)
As someone who drives 5000-6000 miles a year in an EV, I don't love $130 flat rate, but it's not far enough from the average gas tax to be wildly upsetting to me.
In my state, though, I'm already paying $250 / year, or about $0.04/mile. Gas tax here is $0.576/gallon which comes out to ~$318.12 annually, or $0.024 / mile for an "average" gas driver (using figures above). If I drove a more average amount, it would be inline.
As others have discussed, the trade-off of a flat fee is not having to devise ways to grant your exact miles driven data to the government, and the taxes are close enough to the gas taxes that I'm not going to be up in arms about it. I save way more than that having virtually no powertrain maintenance. (My state inspection was 15 minutes and $40. Basically they said, yup, it has tires.)
https://afdc.energy.gov/data/10310
https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/ohim/onh00/bar8.htm
https://www.pa.gov/agencies/dmv/vehicle-services/road-user-c...
https://www.pa.gov/agencies/revenue/resources/tax-rates/moto...
Great article from the Guardian.
The American epoch of oil is collapsing. What comes next could be ugly
>Democracies across the planet are now threatened by what might be called fossil fuel fascism – an extremist political movement that breaks laws, spreads lies and threatens violence in an increasingly desperate attempt to maintain markets for oil, gas and coal that would otherwise be replaced by cheaper renewables.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/may/...
This is all so silly. Every other mode of publicly funded transportation infrastructure has direct user fees based on usage, why not roads? Some combination of highway tolls and a weight-based mileage fee.
But that would be an impossible sell because Americans have the impression that roads spring from the ground for free, since they're paid for indirectly with other taxes and figuring out how much of your personal tax bill goes to roads is nearly impossible.
A lot of states have experimented with mileage-based tracking for EVs but there is no realistic way to do it that's not super fiddly or privacy invasive.
It sounds like it would be easy but states would open themselves up to endless nickel-and-diming or fraud.
I do think that a lot of people think that public roads are "free" and cost nothing to build and maintain. It is really hard to make people think about where the labor, materials, and funding come from.
It's probably fake, but recently someone circulated a figure how much a $5 or $6 bus fare actually costs in Auckland - it's about $40 IIRC.
On flip side I do love rapid bus innovation in Auckland, when it works it works pretty well.
Also, lots of publicly funded transportation infrastructure fees don't closely track usage. Many popular public transit systems charge a single fee for unlimited continuous usage or charge per day/month. There's other weird quirks, for example when going the San Francisco Bay area, I always plan my stops in a clockwise direction, because then I don't have to pay bridge tolls when traveling in that direction (north and east), but would in the opposite direction (south and west).
It could be worse. In the "Big Beautiful Bill" they originally had a $250/yr EV tax in it, which then got bumped up to $500 by a Representative who is/was a car dealer owner, before finally being removed because they decided it would be too much effort to make the states collect it for them.
Nevermind the fact that by moving it from gas to oil companies you're also then taxing "energy" more generally and it's gonna show up across the entire economy.
Respectfully, they are.
Tougher to notice. And you can pitch it as a windfall tax.
The only constitutional issue with taxing energy exports is gettin Congress to pass the law and POTUS to sign it.
“No Tax or Duty shall be laid on Articles exported from any State” [1].
[1] https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/ Art. I § 9
They can just outlaw exporting energy, but not tax it.
(wonder where the bill really originates from?)
Kinda opposite really. If I wasn't driving much I'd get a big ass gas guzzler for cheap rather than drop 50k on an EV. Driving long legs in a gas car is pain in the ass too, IDK how people do it.
This 5 year old study suggests that some early reports (on early EVs) lead us to believe that it was a universal truth. After all, the early BMW i3 and Nissan Leaf only had ~50-75 mile range. But even as far back as 2019, that had changed, and electric cars were being driven as much, and often more, than their gasoline equivalents.
See also https://evpowered.co.uk/news/evs-now-clocking-up-more-miles-...
but this endless war of choice is making everything in the world extra horrible
and Russia just got another pass to sell more oil at top dollar to fund their own war
I would like to see a source for that. Usually this is from someone who thinks corporate taxes should be on gross revenue instead of profit.
Globally it was 1.6 T in 2022, direct.
For what they call implicit subsidies, IMF thinks it was $6.7T in 2024. https://www.imf.org/en/publications/wp/issues/2025/12/20/und...
>The scope of the OECD Inventory is therefore broader than conventional conceptions of “subsidy”.
https://fossilfuelsubsidytracker.org/methodology/
...so I guess we should be ganging up on the Netherlands ($1,760 per capita) and Sweden ($924 per person).
I don't own an EV and am sympathetic to the idea that other road users are far more damaging and thus should pay more, however, I would much prefer a flat tax over some insidious Federal tracking device that monitors how much I drive.
Please explain your ideal scenario of who pays for roads. And if your answer is "someone else" (e.g. "taxes", "government", "corporations", "billionaires"), further explain why "someone else" can't use the same argument to make you pay.
The rest of society also pays for the transportation costs of consumer goods, which include diesel and gas taxes which end up funding roads. Every time you buy something that rode on a truck, a fraction of the price you pay is road taxes.