respectfully sir, I think that their argument might be a bit compelling. The reason why a water tax works but a tire tax wouldn't work is that well.. you can't live without water but you can live with bad tires until you don't (with accidents)

but people will simply just say, oh this wouldn't happen to me, life already has so many complications and people would simply postpone the tires.

Now granted, all of this depends upon the amount of taxes, the financial situations and greater analysis of the argument but I wouldn't throw mint5's argument completely.

It is funny but people will buy vice even if it might be taxed but people are simply less likely to do actual preventive measures depending on how much they cost.

I think its because we all have this belief that nothing bad might happen to us until it does and we take things for granted. There must be an effect named after it (survivorship bias? or we think we are the main character or something similar, superman effect?, not sure.)

Water tax is different in many ways, and a bad comparison. Also that water tax phrasing is bizarre, like saying people in famine areas are being silly for refusing to buy food on the moral principle of high cost.

Ignoring the other flaws with analogy, not drinking mostly affects the person and their family. Car accidents affect the primary party. But often also a person chosen at random in a second car. Does a person choosing to not drink, ignoring the other flaws of the analogy, make a random second person die of thirst?

Why have seatbelts and safety regulations if insurance can fix dead people?

... In my experience, not necessarily, especially when it comes to good EV driving habits and a decently designed EV.

By that I mean, if you're driving an EV (or hybrid, to a large extent) properly you are going to be relying on regen braking by default, and if the EV is smart enough, it's going to do at least some limiting of power delivery to minimize wheel skip/etc on even aggressive acceleration.

As anecdata, my Hybrid weighs about 20% more than my first car, yet I've gotten more miles out of my tires than I did on that old Saturn. [0]

Said hybrid weighs close to a Model 3.

[0] - The Subaru doesn't have good data here, because it has the worst luck for killing a tire mid-life with a sidewall puncture/damage and then requires replacing all 4 anyway.

Where that gets problematic is you can't easily validate mileage for something like an online renewal.

I will say you did give me a fun idea however; you could in theory set up a kiosk system where scanning renewal notice + license[0] and get some sort of OBD2 plug-in device, that could record the mileage+vin+other data (to harden against faking attacks[1]) and then you take it back to the kiosk to confirm mileage.

IDK, probably not the best way to do it but maybe there's a good way to handle this sort of scenario.

[0] - In case you abscond with the dispensed device for some reason...

[1] - But this is possibly where it falls apart...

Governments don't need to "scam" people for money, and only the exceptionally useless ones attempt to "steal from people", stealing from people is corruption, not taxation, they have direct power to take whatever they want whenever they deem necessary and spend it however they want (modulo constitutional rules). Note that I'm not denying the existence of corruption here, that would be a much stronger claim, but you'd have to make a case that somehow the corruption is focussed on promoting a new novel kind of vehicle and rather than all the existing ones which have support from the existing stakeholders in manufacturing and fuel supply and presumably more cash for bribes and stuff.

Even if governments were as your rhetoric says, they have no specific desire for electricity prices to be "through the roof", as energy in general is foundational to industrial performance in the same way food is foundational to human performance. This is why gulf states, which are extremely un-democratic, set fixed (and low) fuel prices in the 1960s and only reformed their subsidies rather than removing them entirely in the 2010s.

> We're already at a point, in some EU countries, where superchargers on the highways cost more money than a gasoline car for the same mileage.

I think that says more about the superchargers than the governments.

BMW i3 (2014-2021 version)

Carbon fiber reinforced plastic. Wagon-wheel tires, 155mm wide.

My 2020 one includes the scooter motor generator, a petrol "range extender", and weighs a bit more, slightly less than 3,000 pounds.

Skinny tires and I can go a mix of highway and city driving and get 5.1 miles per kWh.

But the tires are expensive and don't last.

> What reasons wouldn’t also reflect wear against the roads though?

Off-road driving.

I'll give a fun one.

On a lot (really most) of 4WD/AWD drive vehicles, but especially those with 'full-time' (cries in Subaru), if you need to replace one tire 20k miles in (i.e. due to a road hazard etc) you then have to replace the entire set to avoid damaging the drivetrain.

I suppose in theory you could try to 'trust' shops to properly pro-rate such scenarios, however I'm skeptical that it could be implemented in a trustworthy way without being more trouble than it's worth.

cheap tires wear faster than expensive ones in the same category tire. should people who can’t afford slow wearing tires or repaired/used tires be effectively charged more than someone who can afford top of the line?

additionally, most people have probably paid to replace tires worn due to imbalance or other issues. how would that be accounted for?

Not necessarily, although one can argue that it's an attempt to deter gas guzzler vehicles.