EVs on average are heavier than ICE vehicles, and road damage scales with weight very quickly, but that’s not to say EVs are out there tearing up all the roads. Semi-trucks, construction equipment, heavy machinery towing, etc all do way way more damage than passenger vehicles by a wide margin.
> EVs on average are heavier than ICE vehicles, and road damage scales with weight very quickly
So then tax based on weight if that's the differentiator of the damage done? I guess in combination with mileage would make most sense, and add in a scale based on net worth too to make it extra goodie.
Historically, we've taxed based on gasoline usage, which is a pretty decent proxy for both weight and distance traveled, so it ends up being a road use tax. EVs don't use gas, so we need to introduce new road use taxes specifically for them.
Where this new fee has issues is that it would charge EV owners roughly double the average amount paid by ICE owners in federal fuel tax, and wouldn't consider how much driving a given EV is actually doing.
I wonder if it makes more sense to just add a tax on tires. Tire wear for most vehicles should be proportional to actual weight [1] and mileage, modulo tire quality. So just slap a tax on each tire quality type and there is no need for a system to record the mileage and weight of every car.
[1] Commercial vehicle weight is strongly determined by the cargo load.
Hey, at least this isn't a comment section about the states, which rate safety based on how the driver fares in a collision! Which would mean the people least likely to be hurt are the ones that are trying to cheat the tax, and the ones injured or killed are external to the vehicle.
Except of course it is: Americans externalizing costs to save a buck seems to have become endemic
If we go by the fourth power rule that is usually cited, it is kind of shocking how fast damage goes up with weight.
For example if you replaced a typical 40 ft transit bus containing 60 passengers going from point A to point B with those same 60 passengers in 60 subcompact electric SUVs, such as Hyundai Kona SELs, the 60 cars going from A to B would do do about 1% of the road damage that the bus would.
This also leads to an interesting possibility. Suppose you had a large city where everyone was driving the ICE version of the Hyundai Kona SEL, and then they all switched to the electric version. The electric version is ~500 pounds heavier than the ICE version, and by the 4th power rule would cause about 70% more road damage than the ICE version.
However, gasoline use in that city would plummet, and so the number of miles driving by the gas tanker trucks that supply the gas stations would plummet to.
Those trucks are way way way heavier than cars. The reduction in road damage from those trucks driving less would in many cases outweigh the increase in damage from everyone switching to a car that weighs ~500 pounds more.
