My rough calculations accounted for six axles on the lorries, but not dual tyres, much less the many other factors eg contact area, dynamics, tyre pressures etc etc. But I think they’re reasonable to an order of magnitude. While I get the principle you’re setting out, the effects are not equivalent in size: you need thousands, possibly 10s of thousands of car passes per day on a road to equate to the damage caused by a single artic pass, and the ratio of cars to artics is a bit lower than that.

In the UK, MOT inspectors already make an official recording of the vehicle mileage when they do their annual inspection

Remember that in the UK, max speed for an HGV is 60 on a motorway, and 45min rest breaks are required every 4.5hours, ie max driving between rest breaks is 270 miles (not happening on UK roads, you’ll definitely encounter traffic / roadworks and have to slow down before then). So an EV truck that can recharge a couple of hundred miles in 45 minutes can essentially go for as long as the driver here. Something like this:
https://www.volvotrucks.com/en...

The thing is, the tax needs to be designed to work for the next decade at least, though. And over that time, an increasing proportion will be.

I guess that most drivers at least start out with the VED and MOT dates being roughly around the same — MOT first, then VED reasonably soon afterwards, so I suppose that works. Get your actual at MOT and then do the reconciliation and next year forecast at VED renewal. I guess this is some of the detail we’ll get in the future.

The UK private school sector has stayed stable at between 6 and 7% of pupils for literal decades, through endless policy changes. In London, it has become very expensive, but then London attracts a lot of extraordinary wealth, and schools charge what the market will bear. I say this with some knowledge as I had one kid at one expensive North London private school, and other has just switched from a GDST that was a bit cheaper to a different one for sixth form that is eye-watering.

Fees aren’t driven by taxation, they’re driven by the fact that in London, it’s not GPs and solicitors sending their kids to private school, it’s three tiers of ascending wealth:
1. At the bottom, partners in big professional services firms eg PwC or Linklaters, successful business execs in big corporations, etc. They earn 400k+ a year, live in houses worth 1.5 to 5m
2. Next, the finance folks — hedge fundies, i-bankers, and the bottom end of the PE tier. They’re on 1m+ a year, live in houses worth 4 to 10m
3. At the top, the mega wealthy — owners of medium size businesses and upwards, the top of the PE tier, live across multiple homes worth tens of millions, etc.

Obviously, this is a simplification (where do the slebs and artists fit?), but it’s fairly accurate.

The numbers of people who drive that kind of distance from the UK are absolutely miniscule. I doubt it’s even 1 in 1000 Brits who arrive in Marbella in their car rather than a plane. Somewhat different for France, but still, the alternative there is the train, not the plane, for many.

I think it’s a mistake to think that this tax is designed to tax only miles on UK public roads. It’s not a hypothecated tax, after all.

No, I think it’s significant for hauliers as a sector, especially because you have to consider the policy / competition effects of a charge on UK hauliers that affects them both at home and abroad but doesn’t affect non-UK hauliers on UK roads. I think there’ll be a way through but not that simple.

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.

Exempt for the time being. So they’ve got some leeway to try to think of a system that doesn’t penalise UK hauliers while boosting overseas hauliers. Good luck to them with that! I don’t think ti’s going to be straightforward. Maybe they will need to start checking truck mileage at ports, including for foreign vehicles.

No worries! Yes, we in the UK have annual inspections. And the driving test is quite hard, too.

All true, but it’s fairly do-able.

The UK does not have a hypothecated road tax, no matter how much people think it does or think it ought to. And the costs to the public purse of vehicles are much more extensive than just roads maintenance. There’s NHS costs (respiratory damage, cardiovascular damage, accidents, etc etc), policing, productivity hits from congestion, etc.

Tough titties on you, tbh. Taxes are never perfect. There’s always cliff-edges, winners and losers, ways of gaming the system, etc.