For electric vehicle owners who park their cars on a driveway this is unlikely to make electric cars unattractive. They will be charging their cars overnight on special electric vehicle energy...
From April 2028, electric car drivers will pay a road charge of 3p per mile, while plug-in hybrid drivers will pay 1.5p per mile, with the rates going up each year with inflation.
For electric vehicle owners who park their cars on a driveway this is unlikely to make electric cars unattractive. They will be charging their cars overnight on special electric vehicle energy tarrifs and paying a couple of hundred pounds extra per year in tax.
The great majority of British drivers do not have a driveway and parallel park their car wherever they can find space on a given day. As a result they cannot benefit from at-home charging prices instead paying significantly more to use public chargers. I feel that persuading these people to buy an electric car was already extremely difficult (after all they're far more expensive to buy and the fuel efficiencies don't apply for people without driveways) and now the perceived cost of pay-per-mile will make this far worse.
I'm not familiar with the exact details around plug-in-hybrid company car taxes but I believe that the taxes were far lower in the past. Adding a rate of 1.5p per mile onto cars that perhaps weren't actually being plugged in anyway will be interesting.
Comment box Scope: comment response, information, opinion Tone: neutral, slightly skeptical Opinion: yes Sarcasm/humor: none There is already a petrol tax and tolls on motorways. People already...
Comment box
Scope: comment response, information, opinion
Tone: neutral, slightly skeptical
Opinion: yes
Sarcasm/humor: none
now the perceived cost of pay-per-mile will make this far worse.
There is already a petrol tax and tolls on motorways. People already pay per mile. Is this really different?
Also -- Is this a significant cost - and is it really unnecessary? All cars, including electric cars, incur expensive externalities for infrastructure - more than any other mode of ground transport, per passenger-mile. If it's not going to come from taxes on petrol, it has to come from somewhere.
I feel like it's fair to pay for what you use - and if you don't drive, you don't have to pay as much. Some people might call that 'regressive' but I don't think that's accurate. The truly poorest people don't have cars at all, and also bear the majority of the externalities of cars - the pollution (EVs also pollute - a lot), the destruction of ecology, the poor land use and accordingly high cost of living, even traffic fatalities.
3p per mile for an average of 7,000 miles annually (UK) is £210 per year. As a relatively poor person I understand that can be a lot. But the cost savings of switching from petrol to electric is at least £400 even if you only use public chargers (assuming averages for other numbers). So even with a 0% home charging rate, it's still a cost improvement from petrol? And electric cars are going to continue to drop in price, so the savings will grow in the future compared to petrol cars.
Clearly this is a disincentive to go electric, but it's also a disincentive to drive - which is probably a net benefit for society.
I think their emphasis on “perceived” was for good reason. The absolute amount is low, the reasons you outline are fairly sensible, and the tax is already baked into petrol prices - but none of...
I think their emphasis on “perceived” was for good reason. The absolute amount is low, the reasons you outline are fairly sensible, and the tax is already baked into petrol prices - but none of that changes the optics, nor the psychological burden of adding a counter to something that wasn’t previously counted. Just look at how many people talk about EV range anxiety when they’ve got a 300 mile battery and never drive more than 50 miles in a day. I know Labour are fighting an actively hostile press, but that isn’t new and it isn’t changing - they seem fantastically incapable of thinking through the broader behavioural impact and potential publicity pitfalls of what they’re doing in light of that, and this just strikes me as another example of the same problem.
I’m a bit skeptical of this per-mile metering even being particularly worthwhile given the relatively low expected payment per vehicle. It looks like the collection overheads are going to be a hassle and extra expense for somebody along the chain, the process to handle new cars that don’t yet need MOTs seems poorly thought through, and the fossil fuel industry gets another talking point to give people anxiety about EVs. A flat charge of a few hundred per year seems arguably better to manage, even if nominally less fair; just take whatever the monitoring infrastructure was going to cost and spend that on a decent PR campaign to sell the policy to the public for once!
Old comments on old, now deleted, post about a similar topic - https://tildes.net/~misc/wum#comment-6hxe - same applies there that I mentioned this would likely be coming for EVs and a mileage...
However, mileage readings will be based on in-vehicle odometers, which the government acknowledges can be subject to tampering, or "clocking". It recognises that the introduction of the tax "may increase the likelihood of motorists choosing to clock their vehicles", and said it was looking at ways to mitigate this.
Old comments on old, now deleted, post about a similar topic - https://tildes.net/~misc/wum#comment-6hxe - same applies there that I mentioned this would likely be coming for EVs and a mileage check is the easiest way to do so. That said, odometers are pretty impervious to tampering these days and the cost of finding someone that can "clock" it is going to be greater than the cost of just paying the tax in the first place.
These incentives seem a bit perverse, specifically with taxing plug in hybrids. The whole point of getting a hybrid vehicle is that you can “beat” the system and pay less in fuel taxes by being...
These incentives seem a bit perverse, specifically with taxing plug in hybrids.
The whole point of getting a hybrid vehicle is that you can “beat” the system and pay less in fuel taxes by being more fuel efficient than the government expects the average vehicle to be. Hybrid vehicles were taxed less than conventional vehicles because they used less fuel which created a nice incentive to buy efficient vehicles.
EVs never pay any fuel taxes, so they definitely would have to pay for their road usage at some point, but to keep the incentives moving in the right direction, their should be some split of the EV road costs between charging the EV drivers and increasing the fuel tax. Once some critical mass of EV share is reached, you can start ramping up the price the EV drivers pay since there wouldn’t be enough gasoline vehicles to subsidize them.
Gasoline taxes are pitched as a way to pay for car infrastructure in a way that approximates one’s usage of the road network, but they have a second use that most politicians wouldn’t dare to talk about. Gas taxes are also a carbon emission control lever. Governments can artificially increase fuel prices to try and lower fuel usage. Some may say that it’s not fair that gasoline vehicle drivers would pay more than hybrids or EVs in “road taxes”, but it should be unfair. If someone wanted to stop paying more than their “fair share”, they could just get a hybrid or EV in the future.
I feel like this is a lot more fair than what we have to deal with in Ohio in the US (where it's a state by state ordeal). Our Tesla is penalized with an extra $200/year at registration time and...
I feel like this is a lot more fair than what we have to deal with in Ohio in the US (where it's a state by state ordeal). Our Tesla is penalized with an extra $200/year at registration time and our hybrid (that only gets 25 mpg) $100/year. We barely drive and in no way would pay that amount in gas tax for the Tesla (and the hybrid we already pay the gas tax).
Presumably they'd have to start recording the mileage at sale. Otherwise when you buy a vehicle 3 days before its MOT is due, you'd be on the hook for all of the previous driver's mileage. And MOT...
Presumably they'd have to start recording the mileage at sale. Otherwise when you buy a vehicle 3 days before its MOT is due, you'd be on the hook for all of the previous driver's mileage. And MOT don't happen until a vehicle is 3 years old anyway. And when you board a continental ferry or train service, so that miles done outside of the UK don't count. Or maybe they will count. That sounds unfair enough to be a british government policy right now.
I have no idea why they didn't add tarrifs or duty style taxes to public charging infrastructure, and home charging tarrifs. Most people I know with charge at home EVs leverage their smart meter to get advantageous electricity prices. They might be worried about a few folks "scamming" them out of a few pennies using solar for the three days a year when they could charge from that source.
That sounds much easier and cheaper than trying to record mileage everywhere.
Of course there's no detail yet. I fully expect that whatever we do will be done in the least competent, most complex, least cost efficient way possible, as is the British way. 🇬🇧
EVs are better for the environment than ICE vehicles, but they're still bad for the environment. I'm all for charging as much of the negative externalities of driving back to the people doing the...
EVs are better for the environment than ICE vehicles, but they're still bad for the environment. I'm all for charging as much of the negative externalities of driving back to the people doing the driving.
I know it's not quite as bad in the UK, but in the US, there's this perception that having a car is freedom, and paying for and maintaining a car is rugged individualism and being responsible for paying your own transportation, versus public transit which is seen as government handouts and mooching. That of course is ignoring the hundreds of billions we spend on subsidies for cars in the form of highways, cheap fuel, direct subsidies to auto manufacturers and so on.
Making people directly feel more of those costs on a mile per mile basis is the only way I can think of to make people realize how much more efficient and sustainable public transit is, but it's incredibly unpopular in the US.
For electric vehicle owners who park their cars on a driveway this is unlikely to make electric cars unattractive. They will be charging their cars overnight on special electric vehicle energy tarrifs and paying a couple of hundred pounds extra per year in tax.
The great majority of British drivers do not have a driveway and parallel park their car wherever they can find space on a given day. As a result they cannot benefit from at-home charging prices instead paying significantly more to use public chargers. I feel that persuading these people to buy an electric car was already extremely difficult (after all they're far more expensive to buy and the fuel efficiencies don't apply for people without driveways) and now the perceived cost of pay-per-mile will make this far worse.
I'm not familiar with the exact details around plug-in-hybrid company car taxes but I believe that the taxes were far lower in the past. Adding a rate of 1.5p per mile onto cars that perhaps weren't actually being plugged in anyway will be interesting.
Comment box
There is already a petrol tax and tolls on motorways. People already pay per mile. Is this really different?
Also -- Is this a significant cost - and is it really unnecessary? All cars, including electric cars, incur expensive externalities for infrastructure - more than any other mode of ground transport, per passenger-mile. If it's not going to come from taxes on petrol, it has to come from somewhere.
I feel like it's fair to pay for what you use - and if you don't drive, you don't have to pay as much. Some people might call that 'regressive' but I don't think that's accurate. The truly poorest people don't have cars at all, and also bear the majority of the externalities of cars - the pollution (EVs also pollute - a lot), the destruction of ecology, the poor land use and accordingly high cost of living, even traffic fatalities.
3p per mile for an average of 7,000 miles annually (UK) is £210 per year. As a relatively poor person I understand that can be a lot. But the cost savings of switching from petrol to electric is at least £400 even if you only use public chargers (assuming averages for other numbers). So even with a 0% home charging rate, it's still a cost improvement from petrol? And electric cars are going to continue to drop in price, so the savings will grow in the future compared to petrol cars.
Clearly this is a disincentive to go electric, but it's also a disincentive to drive - which is probably a net benefit for society.
I think their emphasis on “perceived” was for good reason. The absolute amount is low, the reasons you outline are fairly sensible, and the tax is already baked into petrol prices - but none of that changes the optics, nor the psychological burden of adding a counter to something that wasn’t previously counted. Just look at how many people talk about EV range anxiety when they’ve got a 300 mile battery and never drive more than 50 miles in a day. I know Labour are fighting an actively hostile press, but that isn’t new and it isn’t changing - they seem fantastically incapable of thinking through the broader behavioural impact and potential publicity pitfalls of what they’re doing in light of that, and this just strikes me as another example of the same problem.
I’m a bit skeptical of this per-mile metering even being particularly worthwhile given the relatively low expected payment per vehicle. It looks like the collection overheads are going to be a hassle and extra expense for somebody along the chain, the process to handle new cars that don’t yet need MOTs seems poorly thought through, and the fossil fuel industry gets another talking point to give people anxiety about EVs. A flat charge of a few hundred per year seems arguably better to manage, even if nominally less fair; just take whatever the monitoring infrastructure was going to cost and spend that on a decent PR campaign to sell the policy to the public for once!
Old comments on old, now deleted, post about a similar topic - https://tildes.net/~misc/wum#comment-6hxe - same applies there that I mentioned this would likely be coming for EVs and a mileage check is the easiest way to do so. That said, odometers are pretty impervious to tampering these days and the cost of finding someone that can "clock" it is going to be greater than the cost of just paying the tax in the first place.
These incentives seem a bit perverse, specifically with taxing plug in hybrids.
The whole point of getting a hybrid vehicle is that you can “beat” the system and pay less in fuel taxes by being more fuel efficient than the government expects the average vehicle to be. Hybrid vehicles were taxed less than conventional vehicles because they used less fuel which created a nice incentive to buy efficient vehicles.
EVs never pay any fuel taxes, so they definitely would have to pay for their road usage at some point, but to keep the incentives moving in the right direction, their should be some split of the EV road costs between charging the EV drivers and increasing the fuel tax. Once some critical mass of EV share is reached, you can start ramping up the price the EV drivers pay since there wouldn’t be enough gasoline vehicles to subsidize them.
Gasoline taxes are pitched as a way to pay for car infrastructure in a way that approximates one’s usage of the road network, but they have a second use that most politicians wouldn’t dare to talk about. Gas taxes are also a carbon emission control lever. Governments can artificially increase fuel prices to try and lower fuel usage. Some may say that it’s not fair that gasoline vehicle drivers would pay more than hybrids or EVs in “road taxes”, but it should be unfair. If someone wanted to stop paying more than their “fair share”, they could just get a hybrid or EV in the future.
I feel like this is a lot more fair than what we have to deal with in Ohio in the US (where it's a state by state ordeal). Our Tesla is penalized with an extra $200/year at registration time and our hybrid (that only gets 25 mpg) $100/year. We barely drive and in no way would pay that amount in gas tax for the Tesla (and the hybrid we already pay the gas tax).
It’s the same here in CA. I think my Bolt EV cost something like $375 in total this year.
Presumably they'd have to start recording the mileage at sale. Otherwise when you buy a vehicle 3 days before its MOT is due, you'd be on the hook for all of the previous driver's mileage. And MOT don't happen until a vehicle is 3 years old anyway. And when you board a continental ferry or train service, so that miles done outside of the UK don't count. Or maybe they will count. That sounds unfair enough to be a british government policy right now.
I have no idea why they didn't add tarrifs or duty style taxes to public charging infrastructure, and home charging tarrifs. Most people I know with charge at home EVs leverage their smart meter to get advantageous electricity prices. They might be worried about a few folks "scamming" them out of a few pennies using solar for the three days a year when they could charge from that source.
That sounds much easier and cheaper than trying to record mileage everywhere.
Of course there's no detail yet. I fully expect that whatever we do will be done in the least competent, most complex, least cost efficient way possible, as is the British way. 🇬🇧
EVs are better for the environment than ICE vehicles, but they're still bad for the environment. I'm all for charging as much of the negative externalities of driving back to the people doing the driving.
I know it's not quite as bad in the UK, but in the US, there's this perception that having a car is freedom, and paying for and maintaining a car is rugged individualism and being responsible for paying your own transportation, versus public transit which is seen as government handouts and mooching. That of course is ignoring the hundreds of billions we spend on subsidies for cars in the form of highways, cheap fuel, direct subsidies to auto manufacturers and so on.
Making people directly feel more of those costs on a mile per mile basis is the only way I can think of to make people realize how much more efficient and sustainable public transit is, but it's incredibly unpopular in the US.