Electric cars and road tax – a sticky wicket ⛽

Electric cars and road tax – a sticky wicket ⛽
Eventually the automobile is going to become electric. Even if climate change wasn’t a serious threat, the need for more urban pollution control and the flexibility of fuel that electricity represents and the precise control of torque and speed of electric motors means that’s where the future of the automobile industry resides.

But how on earth do you tax automobiles to cover the cost of running electric cars on these roads? It’s easy to tax gasoline, as it’s primarily a motor vehicle fuel. You can’t tax electricity as a fuel because it has many different uses.

You could tax roads by installing cameras and sensors to create toll roads but the thing that is not a practical option except on the biggest thoroughfares and would lead many roads to be untaxed, unfairly burdening commuters on select routes. People might shun the major highways to save money on tolls, causing additional traffic problems.

The other way would be a mile tax but that’s harder than some think. You could tax based on vehicle weight and miles traveled but that opens a series of problems. For one, if it’s a yearly tax collected after safety inspections, than the big tax bill at the end of the year would be be difficult for families to afford. They could do budget plans, but even those might challenging to administer, especially for folks without bank accounts. Without paying for the tax up front, people also might over use the roads and hit with a surprise tax bill.

Smart vehicles could talk to a satellite or cell phone tower to report their mileage but I would imagine that would lead to all kinds of privacy concerns. Would the government use GPS coordinates to secretly track people? Plus in outlying areas there might be infrequent and poor cell and satellite service, making it difficult to get regular reports on vehicle milage. It also would be impossible to track legacy electric vehicles without these sensors – and risk abuse when people unplugged or tampered with these sensors.