This is creepy. If an EV purchase comes with a side of government surveillance then I will not purchase one.
Never heard of the Chicken Tax……
It does raise an interesting policy question though, regardless of the proposed solution, Historically most states fund their road and transportation infrastructure maintenance through gas consumption taxes. EV users are not contributing to that, while still “consuming” use of the roads those taxes are paying for. The more people that switch to EVs (which the government is incentivizing), the more people who will not be contributing to the cost of maintenance for roads. While unfair even now, eventually that would become unsustainable and the model for funding road, bridge and tunnel maintenance would need to change. It’s inherently more fair as a consumption tax of some kind, so what do you substitute it with? A tax on charging stations would unfairly disadvantage EV users without home charging versus those with it. And there’s currently no way for the government to meter what portion of home charging is for EVs.
Virginia has a Highway use fee on EV users and even cars with better than average gas consumption. My 2013 sonata qualifies, though its fee is lower than the EV one. You can get it further reduced if you drive <12,000 miles a year but you have to install something on your car that tracks it. It wasn’t worth it to me. But I believe other states have this now too
Assessed how? Fixed rate? If not fixed, how do they know how much mileage you do? And is it only highway driving that is assessed?
GPS tracking is a little above what most would would consent to. That said, a fee based on mileage driven makes a lot of sense. The retiree who drives once a week to the market and to religious service should not have to pay the same road fee as a road warrior.
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Here in WA EV users pay extra $250 a year (added to the reg fees) to cover road taxes.
I drive under 5k/year. Being charged by amount driven per year makes sense to me, but is a huge burden on those who have to commute long distances because they can’t afford to live closer to town and their work.
I would not like having any tracking. We are supposed to get an annual safety check. They also check odometer reading. I’d have no problem with them adjusting charge for safety check based on annual mileage driven or something.
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It was some contraption you stuck on your car that recorded your mileage. If you drove 6000 in a year, you’d pay 50% of the charge. They base it off of 12,000 being a typical user. I want to say my car’s full rate was only like $37 or so, so it wouldn’t have saved enough IMO to deal with keeping up with it.
I think I read only an EV was $116. But that was a quick google search.
We pay higher property tax for our EV in the state of North Carolina. It is assessed when we register the car every year. Most cars pay about $38. EV owners pay an additional $140.
Wonder why they wouldn’t just figure it from the yearly inspection? Don’t they get your odometer reading then? Maybe they don’t trust the inspection stations, but then why would they trust them to do an inspection at all?
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Yeah I don’t know. Our Subaru’s app tracks our mileage and Subaru knows everything about the car. I wonder why we couldn’t just upload that? Government… I guess. In the case of our Subaru, that car goes over 12,000 a year so it wouldn’t help anyway. The 2003 Jeep doesn’t qualify for the extra fee.
I don’t care if they know where or go or how much they drive. I just have no desire to worry about getting it, installing it and remembering to turn it in if we sell the car. Not for $17 a year. I’d rather skip a meal out and call it good.
Only about 15 states require an inspection. (Great deal for retail shops. I’d love see the data to show the cost-benefit of those inspections.)
Since the new EV’s are so computerized, I have to believe it would be easy for the manfacturer to report mileage only on an annual basis. Heck some insurance companies are starting to ask for proof of mileage.
Really! I had no idea. That’s kinda terrible.
Other than make-work for car repair shops, I’ve never understood the so-called safey inspection thingy.
I guess you don’t have a lot of crappy falling apart cars driving down roads near you.
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me and the other 34 states that didn’t fall for the repair shop grift. Even the feds could not find a quantifiable benefit.
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It’s only $13 in NC and $13 I’ll gladly pay if it keeps dangerous cars off the roads.
They caught a bad tire on our older kid’s car this time around that we had not noticed. It had a knot forming probably from running into a curb. I’m glad they caught it because we were getting ready to drive 4 hrs to the beach and it would’ve been terrible to have a blow-out on the way. We took a different car and bought new tires (from a different shop) when we returned. Did not have to pay to have it reinspected. Still just $13 but it passed now with new tires.
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You’d be amazed by the number of unregistered, uninsured and uninspected cars on the road.
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Do you think this could be the future of some EVs here given the future bans on the sale of new ICE cars and government subsidies to incentivize purchasing? Or do you think US business and consumer purchasing is more deliberate?
https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2023-china-ev-graveyards/
From the article:
“This time, the cars were likely deserted after the ride-hailing companies that owned them failed, or because they were about to become obsolete as automakers rolled out EV after EV with better features and longer driving ranges. “
Not exactly the current situation here. US consumers don’t have these issues. Our X is 6 years old and still drives like a nice car. If the battery dies, we will likely replace the battery not the car.
ETA: Cheaply made Chinese crap.
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