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this post was submitted on 17 Oct 2023
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The fuel excise is already sort-of meant to be a tax on km driven. Buy more fuel, pay more tax. So I can see where the government is coming from.
But yeah, I also think we need to make low emission vehicles more attractive. The upfront cost prices out too many prospective buyers. You basically need to also own your own home and have solar panels installed to really get the best out of them.
I wonder whether the people who drive the most statistically are the people who buy electric vehicles. I suspect they aren't.
This just another tax exempt for rich who can afford electric car. Electric cars are still luxury.
Are you thinking they'll always be luxury products? Like mobile phones, laptops and home internet connections were?
Nope. Definitely not. But at this time they are.
Yeah, but the tax wasn't an 'at this time' thing, it was a 'from now on' thing.
And as it made it's way down to the people who didn't have thousands of dollars cash on hand at all times, asking people to pay their year's road usage as a single lump sum was going to get more and more impractical.
Fuel tax works because you pay weekly, enforcement is simple and happens at the distribution level, and there's no real way to evade it. None of those things are true for an EV usage tax.
For typical driving habits, this tax worked out to about 80 cents per day. Or $300 per year...
Again, I think EVs should be subsidised not taxed, but this tax wasn't thousands of dollars.
Rego/insurance costs far more, and for me it makes perfect sense to report your kilometres driven each time you renew your rego and pay tax accordingly then (also, at least in some states you can pay rego and insurance monthly).
Enforcement would be easy enough - cops can just check your odometer when they do an RBT/etc.
Odometer cheating is a thing.
You're putting the device doing the measuring in the hands of the people who have to pay money based on what it says.
I'm pretty confident there's already an app I can sideload onto my car to mess with the odometer.
Also, I haven't been pulled over or breath tested in more than 15 years.