On weight. 4th power of weight, road damage is proportional to 4th power of weight.
Yup. Which is why damage due to personal vehicles, even heavy EV ones (heavy due to the batteries), is a rounding error in road damage. A single semi passing on a road shall damage it more than one million regular cars. Something insane like that.
It's totally obvious on the three-lanes european highways: the leftmost lane is never deformed like the right-most lane is. And the rightmost lane is deformed on two bands: precisely where the tires of the semis are passing.
Politicians, worldwide, always prone to steal from people, have of course planned everything: WLTP (Worldwide Harmonised Light Vehicles Test Procedure), are going to make sure they rip everybody off.
The scam is beautiful: in the EU for example... Make sure everybody switches to EV vehicles, then make sure everybody repeats "road damage is proportional to 4th power of weight" (with conveniently ignoring the issue of trucks weight), so that then you can tax vehicles that are now heavy.
While, of course, making sure that electricity prices are through the roof.
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.
A tax on tires would at least make some sense. But inventing a tax on weight now that cars have heavy EV batteries is just petty.
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.
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.
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...