That’s an interesting suggestion. However, the reality is there would be large infrequent bills for people. In California, smog checks are not required for the first five years, then only every two years after that, and they stop on older vehicles. Gas vehicles older than 1976 and diesels older than 1997 are smog-exempt and never get inspected. So at best, you’re talking about getting a big bill for the amount of road you used in the past two years. Periodic huge bills are precisely the sort of thing that keep poor people poor.
Ideally you’d need frequent (every year at least) inspections on every car, which (at least in California) is not happening at any level. All of this is my point- short of electronic data gathering, I don’t think mileage data gathering is practical, short of GPS trackers installed on every car that send the data to definitely-won’t-be-hacked government database. And how do we handle the millions and millions of old cars on the road? Order them all in to have a tracker installed?
