Free rein. As in the thing used to control a horse.

> Under the proposed changes, I'll pay per mile. 50 miles per gallon means I'm driving about 42.5 miles a day. So 42.5 miles * $.027 = $1.1475 tax a day. $1.1475 * 365 = $418.8375 a year. So for bothering to drive a hybrid (how dare I!!!) I'll go from $189.873 up to $418.837. $419 / 190 = 221% increase in gas tax.

Meanwhile you're not paying for roughly $2400/yr in gasoline. If you were driving a gasoline vehicle at a typical 30mpg, your 42.5 miles per day would burn about 1.42 gallons which, at a statewide average cost of $4.569/gal, is $6.47 per day, or $2362.55 per year.

Your annual fuel cost savings decreases from $2172.68 to $1943.71.

So did your have a point or are you just bitter your free ride might be slowing down a tiny bit?

> The asshole in the 20mpg tank won't notice a difference

The asshole getting 20mpg is already paying almost ten times what you would be under the proposed tax at $0.228/mi at current state average gas prices, and I disagree that they won't notice that jump ~12%.

> YAY I'm so happy to be green

I should hope so with an extra 2 grand in your pocket every year over the alternative. Also FYI those higher registration fees are there to make up for the gasoline prices you're already not paying, which is nearly double the tax you'd be paying at the pump otherwise.

"They dropped the cover charge and made admittance to the bar free! How DARE they charge more for drinks!"
=Smidge=
/AND you probably claimed a tax credit buying that vehicle...

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.

Given that the economy works best without distortion, it is wise to have a lot of taxes with relatively low rates rather than a few with very high rates.

Given that drivers on private roads already pay fuel duty for the miles they drive on private roads, it makes sense for the replacement tax to be equally taxing such miles.

Well, if the restaurateurs live in the same area you live in...

It doesn't even have to be linked to the car tax.

NZ uses "Road User Charges" for diesel - it does not have the tax built in at the pump (petrol does), so all diesel cars have to buy blocks of kilometres as tax. The government get updated when your annual vehicle inspection is done, but between those inspections its up to you to make sure you have enough spare kilometres left for your trips. If you get stopped by police and they check, being too far out is considered to be tax evasion and a criminal offence.

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

Who are already required to record mileage on UK roads for other reasons, so thats a solved problem.

The easy way is to check the odometer reading every time you renew. If you decide to lie, well, it's easy to verify because eventually you'll either have to scrap the vehicle or you'll sell it to someone else and they'll have to report the new odometer reading. And it all catches up from there (because the new owner will likely not want to pay for the difference in taxes). And scrapping the car likely needs paperwork so they can cancel the title and deal with tax issues. Of course, if you find a scrapper who is willing to fudge the mileage information maybe you can save some money.

It also makes odometer tampering all that much more criminal since they can then get you for tax evasion.

The reason is simple, Android already offers 2.4/5 GHz. When you go to the hotspot option, the 2.4GHz option is marked "Compatible". Unselecting it means the hotspot will operate at 5GHz.

The reason it generally can't do dual 2.4/5 is because that requires dual radios to operate simultaneously. Your router that does 2.4 and 5GHz has two separate WiFi adapters, one operating at 2.4GHz and the other at 5GHz. These are independent and the underlying software bridges the two with the Ethernet ports.

Phones, generally only connect to one or the other so they only need one radio. This means hotspot mode can only work on one band or another as there's no hardware to work on both simultaneously. (There are two analog sections - because it's hard to re-use the transmitter/receiver hardware for each band. This lets it do a periodic scan of available access points even while connected).

This option lets the hotspot be moved to 6GHz, and depending on the phone hardware, it might be able to do 2.4/6 simultaneously since a lot of 6GHz units have a separate radio unit. But if it's using a single radio triple band, then it can only work on one at a time.

And in New Zealand you can easily drive miles and miles on private roads, which are not maintained by the government...

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...

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)

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.