Are you gonna get an electric car anytime soon? (Or do you already have one?)

[Bobby Henderson]

I'm surprised the EV fees to make up for loss of gasoline taxes isn't higher.

The federal gasoline tax is 18.4¢ per gallon (a rate that has not changed since 1993). Oklahoma's state gasoline tax rate is 19¢ per gallon; only 4 states have lower rates. Oklahoma raised its rate by 3¢ in 2018, the first increase since 1987. The total tax per gallon here in 37.4¢. That's a pretty cheap rate compared to many other states (especially California). But it still adds up. I'm paying a few bucks in taxes every time I fill up my pickup truck.

That's not to suggest I think the gasoline tax rates should be lower. There is no such thing as a free highway. Highways do not build and maintain themselves for nothing. The cost is typically paid either through fuel taxes or tolls. It takes a lot of money to even maintain a city street. The cost of road building and maintenance has seen very serious price inflation over the past 20+ years. Yet the federal gasoline tax has remained unchanged since the early 1990's.

Most states have been very slow at raising their gasoline tax rates. That leaves funding for new highways and maintenance of existing highways at deep deficit levels. Other kinds of infrastructure, such as sidewalks and bike paths are sometimes drawing from the same limited pool of funding. The only thing that can make up the difference are special funding packages, often at the federal level.

Electric vehicles are a wild card in this situation. Currently there doesn't appear to be enough of them on the road to make a big difference in gasoline tax revenue streams. If battery technology can advance enough to make EVs truly practical and affordable then the fuel tax system will have to be completely overhauled. Lithium-Ion batteries are important for many kinds of devices, but I don't think they're so great in electric powered vehicles. I don't know if Carbon-based batteries or something else would be better. I drive 600 miles from Lawton to Colorado Springs on a somewhat regular basis. Making that kind of road trip in an EV would be a giant pain in the ass.

Oklahoma has over 600 miles of turnpikes. Lots of people in this state demand the toll gates should be removed. "The roads are paid for!" If the toll gates were removed Oklahomans would see one hell of a gasoline tax price hike. Money for maintaining those turnpikes (as well as building new ones) has to come from somewhere. By the way, the tolls on Oklahoma's turnpikes are a bargain compared to the rates on most other toll roads. If you have a PikePass or compatible toll tag you'll pay roughly half the license plate pay rate.

If Americans switched to using EVs we would have to come up with some new method for funding road maintenance and improvement. One possibility is a massive proliferation of toll tag readers posted on highways and even city streets. Another is simply taxing motorists on a per mile basis.

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

I'm surprised the EV fees to make up for loss of gasoline taxes isn't higher.

The federal gasoline tax is 18.4¢ per gallon (a rate that has not changed since 1993). Oklahoma's state gasoline tax rate is 19¢ per gallon; only 4 states have lower rates. Oklahoma raised its rate by 3¢ in 2018, the first increase since 1987. The total tax per gallon here in 37.4¢. That's a pretty cheap rate compared to many other states (especially California). But it still adds up. I'm paying a few bucks in taxes every time I fill up my pickup truck.

That's not to suggest I think the gasoline tax rates should be lower. There is no such thing as a free highway. Highways do not build and maintain themselves for nothing. The cost is typically paid either through fuel taxes or tolls. It takes a lot of money to even maintain a city street. The cost of road building and maintenance has seen very serious price inflation over the past 20+ years. Yet the federal gasoline tax has remained unchanged since the early 1990's.

Most states have been very slow at raising their gasoline tax rates. That leaves funding for new highways and maintenance of existing highways at deep deficit levels. Other kinds of infrastructure, such as sidewalks and bike paths are sometimes drawing from the same limited pool of funding. The only thing that can make up the difference are special funding packages, often at the federal level.

Electric vehicles are a wild card in this situation. Currently there doesn't appear to be enough of them on the road to make a big difference in gasoline tax revenue streams. If battery technology can advance enough to make EVs truly practical and affordable then the fuel tax system will have to be completely overhauled. Lithium-Ion batteries are important for many kinds of devices, but I don't think they're so great in electric powered vehicles. I don't know if Carbon-based batteries or something else would be better. I drive 600 miles from Lawton to Colorado Springs on a somewhat regular basis. Making that kind of road trip in an EV would be a giant pain in the ass.

Oklahoma has over 600 miles of turnpikes. Lots of people in this state demand the toll gates should be removed. "The roads are paid for!" If the toll gates were removed Oklahomans would see one hell of a gasoline tax price hike. Money for maintaining those turnpikes (as well as building new ones) has to come from somewhere. By the way, the tolls on Oklahoma's turnpikes are a bargain compared to the rates on most other toll roads. If you have a PikePass or compatible toll tag you'll pay roughly half the license plate pay rate.

If Americans switched to using EVs we would have to come up with some new method for funding road maintenance and improvement. One possibility is a massive proliferation of toll tag readers posted on highways and even city streets. Another is simply taxing motorists on a per mile basis.

Bobby, what people always forget about is road maintainance, upgrades and that entire sections and bridges sometimes have to be replaced. It's very likely that a high percentage of the tolls collected are going towards that. But if we had followed the Roman's road design...

[Lyle Romer]

100% agree with Bobby. If EVs gain mass acceptance, there will have to be some kind of mileage based federal and state tax that is roughly equivalent to the gas tax per mile.

Another issue with EV range is that to get the max range requires being charged to 100%. However, charging to 100% degrades the batteries. If you charge to 100% often then the max range will be noticeably reduced. Also, if you are driving a long distance it will likely be at highway speeds which will lead to probably 20% lower than the published range since the published ranges are based on mixed driving where the city profile takes advantage of regenerative breaking.

It is true that over time a gasoline engine (or diesel) will wear and lose efficiency and range, it's not as big of a deal when it takes 5 minutes to fill up back to 100% range vs. 1/2 hour or more.

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

Um, Lyle, my post back up a ways lists the States that have already implemented a road tax on EV's. The amounts differ per State, but those amounts can change to meet the needs as EV use rises. Charge stations also charge extra fees on each charge cycle to cover their maintainance costs... This has been going on a long time. Utah implemented theirs back when I was still living there, over 8 years ago.

[Randy Stankey]

Doc Brown brought us Mr. Fusion in the 80's but Big Oil bought the patents and destroyed the plans!

But, don't you think that, if there was some killer solution out there, the oil companies would buy up all the patents, build a secret laboratory in the style of Area-51, somewhere in the middle of nowhere to develop the a workable product then, when perfected, exploit their monopoly for as long as they can?

[Marcel Birgelen]

I'm considering installing this one on my car. It's even a flashy red version and even comes with a wall-mount...


s-l1600.jpg

[Leo Enticknap]

I believe that political resistance to a pure pay-per-mile approach will likely be greater than Bobby anticipates, at least in the USA, because it threatens the status of the automobile as a symbol of personal freedom and mobility, which has existed and grown since the 1950s, and because so much of the nation's infrastructure has been developed over that timescale on the assumption that everybody owns one. Growing up in a suburb of London, England, in the 1970s, families that did not own a car were perfectly normal, including many that were wealthy enough to do so if they wanted to. In contrast, I can think of only one person I've met since emigrating to Southern California 11 years ago who didn't, and that wasn't for very long: she moved from New York, and it only took her a few weeks to discover that it was practically impossible to survive without one, even living right in the middle of downtown LA. Even couples who share a single car between them are unusual.

So the idea that the government is going to put a device in your car that tracks every mile you drive scares a lot of us deeply, as does the prospect that a pay-per-mile (not directly linked to energy consumption) scheme will result in us paying more overall than taxation of road fuel did. In regions where that long term infrastructure development forces a lot of the population into long-haul commutes, those fears are amplified.

The political class knows this, which is why I suspect that no mainstream politicians that I am aware of are publicly advocating pay-per-mile. This is in stark contrast to Europe, where it is being discussed openly. I read a story in the British media a couple of weeks ago reporting that the civil service is actively lobbying the government to begin preparatory work to replace fuel duty with pay-per-mile, and is making no secret about it.

As Bobby points out, roads are not free: as against, in most nations that impose a gas tax, little or none of that tax is ringfenced for road maintenance. Most or all goes into the general government pot. My prediction is that they'll find another way to make up the shortfall, e.g. increasing the use of road tolls, and/or annual registration fees that build the previous fuel duty cost in, averaged out assuming typical mileage figures per driver.

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

Leo... You are correct! That's why so far, it's just a flat fee in addition to the cost of the license plate fee. If States charged by the mile , they would have to form entirely new departments to do the tracking and billing for that. While now, they just add a flat fee for your EV. And it's easy for the States to raise or lower that fee as necessary.

[Lyle Romer]

Leo, you make a good point. Any per mile charge would have to be based on an odometer that is read once a year or something like that and ABSOLUTELY NOT a GPS that actually tracks routes driven. It is certainly possible to make an odometer that can't be tampered with. You can simply use one time writeable memory and write 1 bit for every mile driven. You'd only need 125 kB for 1 million miles recording capability.

Either there will have to be some kind of mileage based road tax or registration fees will have to be raised somewhat significantly and States will have to pay part of the registration fees to the Federal Government.

But, don't you think that, if there was some killer solution out there, the oil companies would buy up all the patents, build a secret laboratory in the style of Area-51, somewhere in the middle of nowhere to develop the a workable product then, when perfected, exploit their monopoly for as long as they can?

They only have 17 years to do it until the Patent expires!

[Marcel Birgelen]

In the Netherlands, unlike countries like many southern European countries, toll-roads are almost non-existent. The Netherlands can be considered less conservative than the United States on most issues and has historically had very high taxes on both automobiles and fuel. A pay-per-kilometer approach for road usage taxation has been tried since the 1990s and has since failed multiple times, because of numerous issues, ranging from technical feasibility to costs and privacy.

Germany, where cars are a far greater status symbol than in the Netherland, but where there are also almost no toll roads, has introduced a "per kilometer" taxing system for heavy traffic classes on motorways (the notorious German Autobahn), but for cars, there still is only a "flat fee" tax. All attempts to introduce "usage-based" billing seem to fail sooner than later. In Germany, the same seems to be true to the non-existent general speed limit on the German Autobahn...

Some things are a bit like the 2nd Amendment in the U.S., practically untouchable.

[Leo Enticknap]

It's nicknamed the political "third rail," a metaphor with the third rail power delivery method to trains. If you touch the third rail you will be electrocuted and die, so in the political sense, a "third rail" issue is one on which such an overwhelming majority of supporters of all the major parties agree on one position, that someone running for office who advocates the opposing position (e.g. legalizing sex with five-year olds) is likely to kill their chances of election; or where public opinion is equally divided, not along party lines, and you are therefore unlikely to gain an electoral advantage by coming down on one side or the other (e.g. year-round daylight savings time). All the polling I've seen suggests that pay-per-mile (or kilometer) is firmly in the former category, and Marcel's description of what happened to the idea in The Netherlands and Germany tends to support that, too. I take Lyle's point that it is technically possible to implement it without tracking individual vehicle movements, but few are likely to believe any government which claims that it is being implemented that way.

[Randy Stankey]

Cambridge, MA and other places have excise taxes on all cars principally garaged within it's borders. They use vehicle registration data to tell.
Every year, you get a tax bill based on the type of car and its age/value. Don't pay it and you can't register your car.

If there was a per-car excise tax on ALL cars, I'd agree if only begrudgingly. We have to pay for the roads somehow. Right?

However, if it was a tax on only certain cars, I'd be against it.

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

Cambridge, MA and other places have excise taxes on all cars principally garaged within it's borders. They use vehicle registration data to tell.
Every year, you get a tax bill based on the type of car and its age/value. Don't pay it and you can't register your car.

If there was a per-car excise tax on ALL cars, I'd agree if only begrudgingly. We have to pay for the roads somehow. Right?

However, if it was a tax on only certain cars, I'd be against it.

Are you talking about EV's, or all cars? Otherwise am not sure what you're getting at, but that excise tax is normally collected at the gas pump. That way, even out of towners help pay for the roads they are using. IDK, perhaps Cambridge doesn't charge that excise tax at the pumps... but the 38 other States I've driven in certainly do.
Here is some info on the gas tax and the rate each State charges...

https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/s...ax-rates-2024/

[Randy Stankey]

All cars. They’ve even doing it for years.
It is in addition to gas taxes at the pump.

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

Good grief! I looked it up and it's a State wide personal property tax on vehicles. Assesed at $25 per $1000 value. Glad I don't live there...