Companies more interested in their own profit than the defence or their country. What a shining example of loyalty, and asking 'not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country'. Corporate greed will be the death of America.
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.
The gasoline tax was introduced to encourage the adoption of pollution free alternatives by building out the infrastructure that was required to charge these vehicles.
Absolute bollocks. There was duty on fuel back when the only EVs on the roads were milk floats.
It’s almost as though you’re completely unaware that you’re commenting on a story about a change to taxation in one of the three countries in the world that is not the US.
What they’re proposing is fairly straightforward for the UK, where cars have to pay an annual tax to be on the road and have an annual test (“MOT”) to ensure roadworthiness annually. The plan is that drivers estimate the mileage for the year ahead and pay that as part of their annual tax, and then there’s a reconciliation when the car goes for its MOT.
There’s a few complications to work through, but it’s relatively easy to implement.
The fact that a small number of drivers will have to pay for some miles driven outside the UK is really not that big a deal.
You're forgetting about hauliers.
1. Taxes on ICE vehicles don’t begin to capture the cost externalities associated with their use. Health costs from tailpipe pollutants alone are really significant. It was never a hypothecated tax because (a) the UK doesn’t really do any hypothecated taxes, and (b) the costs aren’t just roads
2. The weight difference between an EV and an ICE vehicle is completely irrelevant for the purpose of road wear. Road wear is essentially entirely caused by large vehicles — buses, lorries, etc — because as you yourself pointed out, it grows as the fourth power. So a 1.5 ton EV supermini causes about 1.8x the damage of the ICE vehicle. But a bus weighing 12 tons causes something like 1,500 times the damage, and a 40 ton artic (= semi) causes something like 30,000x the damage. Even the difference between a heavy UK SUV at 2.5 tons and the 1.3 ton ICE supermini is just unimportant by comparison.
I think you’re dancing on the head of a pin, here. All taxes have some edge cases where they create some unfairness, whether income or consumption or property or anything else. The fact that a small number of drivers will have to pay for some miles driven outside the UK is really not that big a deal. It’s a tiny percentage of the total number of vehicles on the road in any one year.
The bigger distortion compared to fuel tax is that the most efficient EV pays at the same rate as the least efficient. Fuel duty was much better in that respect. But a tax per kWh would have been too on-the-nose, I guess, given how people are grumpy about the costs of charging already. Plus, submitting estimates of annual mileage and reconciling each year is a lot easier.
Corporations or lobbying, take your pick.
Wait until you look up the properties of petrol.
You see but you do not observe. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, in "The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes"
