By this argument gas taxes should also be abolished for ICE passenger cars. In case it’s not clear, I’m all for everybody paying their fair share and I think EV owners have just as much of an obligation as any other vehicle operator on public roads.
Clearly these “fair shares” are in great need of adjustment as those that do the most impact aren’t paying what they should.
They are thinking about putting tracking devices in the vehicles (as a pilot project) so if you could figure out how roll those out cheaply for every vehicle… but… tracking… no thanks. At best, the device should NOT have a cell function, just display an encrypted number that you report - a number that only reflects in-state driving, a vehicle ID code plus a checksum to catch people submitting false readings.
No doubt there will come a time when all this is standard in every new vehicle, just like air bags and tail lights, a tracking system will be federally mandated by the DOT.
Big Brother and all that.
Me either, but while the heavy truck operators wouldn’t be punished, the roads would be funded. And if you think about it, a good chunk of those trucks are on the roads bringing us the crap we ordered.
The safety benefits alone are too much to ignore. A transponder would give you automatic reporting of any crash, with the ability to dispatch emergency services on the basis of data alone. In my former job we had to use inductive vehicle detectors for that, with low (500 metre) resolution and a 20 second sampling rate.
Like all things, you need consider both the good applications and the evil applications. And at how poorly any transmitted data is secured these days.
Although with a nice chunk of years of social media actions and activity blurring/erasing the expectation of personal privacy, it may not be as hard a sell as it used to be.
Yeahhhh, but as I said earlier… Chevrolet: 30 ICE vehicles to 1 EV. “Eventually” is still pretty far off.
ETA unless something drastic happens to force the issue.
Sure, but if the complaint is that gas taxes are dropping, forcing funding shortfalls for roads, rather than completely shift to a new revenue source, why not make it a gradual transition from gas tax to (other, more stable) revenue source? Reduce the initial impact to the new source while holding onto the disincentive for ICE cars?
Fixed that for you.
Reminder, the US income tax rate on incomes over $200,000 was 94%. 
I’m also now wondering how much of a shortfall it really is. Again, looking at the offerings from Chevy, and knowing there aren’t many other manufacturers apart from Tesla that have a robust EV or Hybrid lineup – in fact, Subaru got rid of the Crosstrek Hybrid for awhile there, and only just brought it back for 2020 as a limitedly available option – how many vehicles on the road in Utah are electric/hybrid?
Apparently enough to worry them, but now I may be thinking this is more a case of getting a process in place in time, or not wanting to let a single possible penny slip away.
No arguments here and I feel as if we’re agreeing a lot more than not. The whole way roadways are funded is pretty messed up in general, and it’s not helped by being a fetid mixture of federal, state, and private funding.
Almost as if this is a complicated problem to address in an equitable manner.
Nor does lobbying help the situation. It feels like the main driving force behind most lobbying is maintaining the status quo once they’ve managed to get theirs. Not the improvement of our lives.
The “fee” isn’t for general environmental use, it is for roads. I have a plug in hybrid. On a typical day I drive it fewer miles then it’s electric range (or to be 100% accurate, some days I drive under the range and charge at home, others I drive under twice the range with a charge at the office in between).
I still drive it on roads, it isn’t a light vehicle (it is lighter then most SUVs, but it isn’t “like a bike”). I still want the traffic lights to work, for storm drains to be cleaned so rain water doesn’t backup onto the roads. I still want potholes fixed.
All that stuff costs money.
Shouldn’t I be paying for that?
We could decide “no, only filthy gas users pay!”, but then we end up with the perverse incentive for local governments to reduce EV adoption, or even push it back. We could decide “nah, forget gas tax, roll it into income tax”, which wouldn’t be the end of the world, but it would have non-drivers pay for roads they don’t use (or if they take the bus, pay twice for the roads). We could tie the money we use for roads more directly to the road use (flat fee per vehicle size, or a government monitored mileage tracker of some sort).
Whichever it is, decide fast because I’m getting rid of the car this year. You don’t have long to extract fees from me 
(unless you go income tax based)
Science!
Wife and I share one car - 4 year old Leaf we bought with 30k miles on it for $14k. 18 months later, I’ve put air in the tires and bought a gallon of windshield washer fluid.
No one in the US “doesn’t use roads.” Not everyone drives, but everyone who isn’t Grizzly Adams depends on roads for most of the things they do, the stuff they use, and the food they eat. That’s my fundamental problem with a mileage tax.
The dude down the street from me who makes a living buying and selling stuff on ebay uses road more than I do, even if he never drives.
Toyota, Honda, Hyundai, Nissan, VW/Audi/Porsche, BMW, heck, even Ford is introducing an EV Mustang. It’s taken too long and the progress remains slow, but it is happening.
This. When non-drivers say they don’t use roads, I wonder how they get to work, eat, send their kids to school, power their homes…
All those things require functioning roads. The bus needs something to drive on. The power company truck. The supermarket network. If you don’t want to fund roads because you “don’t use them”, I hope your house never catches fire or you need an ambulance. Everybody benefits from functional roads.
In fact, there is a very American ring to this. “I don’t use roads, so why should I pay for them?” sounds an awful lot like “I keep healthy, so why should I pay for someone else’s healthcare?”
I agree with gas taxes – especially those used to help cut carbon emissions – but functioning roads are part of a functioning modern society. We can debate endlessly about who “ought” to pay for them but the hard truth is we’ll all pay if nobody does.
Don’t forget the “I don’t have kids, so why should I pay for schools?” or even worse, people whose kids have graduated who no longer want to pay for schools.
And in an ideal world, the mileage tax gets passed on to the purchase price of the goods and services. In the actual world, it doesn’t exactly, but it’s pretty close.
so unfairness is already baked in. There’s your problem-- tinkering around with consumption taxes won’t solve it.
You’re thinking of biodiesel-powered cars. Electric vehicles are powered by whatever spins the electric generators. Depending on the electric utility, that could be a non-fossil fuel source, or it could be natural gas, or it could be coal.
IT’S A SHAKEDOWN, I TELLS YA!!!
