While this is an option, reliability would go waaay down for multiple reasons.

FYI, their statement about Iceland is wrong. BEV sales were:

2019: 1000
2020: 2723
2021: 3777
2022: 5850
2023: 9260
2024 (first year of the "kílómetragjald" and the loss of VAT-free purchases): 2913
2025: 5195

Does this look like the changes had no impact to anyone here? It's a simple equation: if you increase the cost advantage of EVs, you shift more people from ICEs to EVs, and if you decrease it, the opposite happens. If you add a new mileage tax, but don't add a new tax to ICE vehicles, then you're reducing the cost advantage. And Iceland's mileage tax was quite harsh.

The whole structure of it is nonsensical (they're working on improving it...), and the implementation was so damned buggy (it's among other things turned alerts on my inbox for government documents into spam, as they keep sending "kílómetragjald" notices, and you can't tell from the email (without taking the time to log in) whether it's kílómetragjald spam or something that actually matters). What I mean by the structure is that it's claimed to be about road maintenance, yet passenger cars on non-studded tyres do negligible road wear. Tax vehicles by axle weight to the fourth times mileage, make them pay for a sticker for the months they want to use studded tyres, and charge flat annual fees (scaled by vehicle cost) for non-maintenance costs. Otherwise, you're inserting severe distortion into the market - transferring money from those who aren't destroying the roads to subsidize those who are, and discouraging the people who aren't destroying the roads from driving to places they want to go (quality of life, economic stimulus, etc)

Probably the fact that Trump recently clawed back the previous 6GHz spectrum allocation so he can give it to his billionaire buddies.

Road maintenance isn't the only cost. Automobiles have a lot of externalized costs that are bared by the government besides just building roads. You need to constantly be building out new cities with new infrastructure in order to make room for cars and a car centric society.

You could tax the car companies themselves to pay for it but good luck with that. Realistically if you have the political power to do something like that you probably wouldn't have a car centric society that shifts billions of dollars of cost on to consumers.

Yeah my bad, I thought they were commenting why everyone is surprised by the inspection, I figured everyone in the UK knows they have inspections but some folk don't even know of the concept around here. .

We've seen how this movie ends, yet they're still pursuing this?

I would hope most every folk understand why such a tax is necessary and good but I guess I've never seen the logistical and privacy costs of tracking the miles driven worth the benefits over just flat rating the EV at registration, or making it based on vehicle weight or some other fact of the vehicle and driver. The best taxes tend to be the ones that are the simplest to comply with.

Don't know where you are from but here in America(TM) we let the states decide how and whether at all vehicles get inspected, despite the fact there are zero restrictions for driving between state borders.

I live in a no inspection state and while when I did it was annoying to have to take it in every year or two the number of tires in the parking lot I see with the belt wires poking out tells me they're probably a good thing.

The fires can be worse but gas cars catch on fire like 2-20x as often.

This is also a problem that is only going to get better over time, most companies are moving away from lithium-ion and they are making more and more stable. In 20 years all the batteries will be solid state and those vehicles will effectively be inert, the only flammable device will be the airbags.

This was more interesting counterpoint back in the 2010's where every Tesla that caught fire made the national news but the stats just don't back it up.

Yes it does seem like this admin believes in the "realist" sphere-of-influence pre-WWI style of international relations.

Surely by coincidence this is also the position Russia holds, funny how that keeps happening!!

Depends on whether you think a multi-polar world can exist today. I don't think it can, there will be a global hegemon and your choices are China or the USA.

The examples I can find where someone actually got in trouble were explicit calls to violence. The famous one is a guy who wrote for a British sitcom called Father Ted. He explicitly said that if you see a trans girl in a woman's bathroom you should punch them in the balls. The two that got actual jail time were inciting an attack on a hotel full of immigrants during riots. Even in America that's not legal we just very seldom enforce those laws.

The example in the article you linked to the police admitted they were wrong and paid the people in question 20,000 British pounds as compensation. In America the 20K would not have been worth it because every time you interact with police there's a high probability they are going to kill you. When police get something wrong in America the payout should probably be at least half a million to account for that. But as far as I know the cops in the UK don't just randomly murder people for shits and giggles like they do in United States.

I'm not saying that there isn't some abuse going on though. 12,000 arrests is insane.

But at the same time they're probably needs to be a middle ground between arresting 12,000 people and the rampant stochastic terrorism we've got going on here in the United States where we've got idiots running around killing people trying to start a race war.

We have AI to summarize the AI slop articles.

Well, I'm about to find out if I need to do my first chargeback, I have a delayed response on a return authorization for where I was sent the wrong item. They advertised a different version. This might be confusing for them since the difference is small - yet critical. But there really should be no confusion because they advertised the other version both in the images and the product name/listing title.

I'm the same, always use a good credit card, but the occasional hassle is worth it. The prices are 1/10th the Amazon ones.