Question For EV Present and Future Owners

[ChristineM]

No.
This is how my electric bill is figured:
Service Charge $5.00
Summer Energy Charge 800 kWh @ $0.085005 per kWh $68.00
Summer Energy Charge 352 kWh @ $0.102214 per kWh $35.98
Power Cost Adjustment $8.72
Fixed Cost Adjustment $8.07
Energy Efficiency Services $3.38
Federal Columbia River Benefits Supplied by BPA - $4.17
Current Charges - Electric Service $124.98


The federal government dedicates about 85 percent of federal gasoline excise tax revenues to highways, with the remainder primarily supporting transit. The federal government distributes the associated revenues to states through various highway and transit grant programs.

States are different, see How Much Gas Tax Money States Divert Away From Roads - Reason Foundation.

In Europe fuel is taxed heavily, the majority of the income is not spent on roads.

And the providers are taxed on their income from electricity sales.which is added on the bill but not itemised

 

[ChristineM]

We don't report our odometer reading here. Do you Canadians have to?
Just how do you plan on getting the GPS-based measured distance driven from a motor vehicle

Do you have a vehicle safety check every year or two? If so your odometer reading is recorded

 

[9-10ths_Penguin]

We have that for lorries (but it's flat and only on state roads and Autobahnen). I and most other drivers wouldn't like that for private cars because it could easily be turned into a surveillance system. So we pay a car tax and a petrol tax and lorries additionally pay toll. That helps to maintain all the road construction sites.

We have electronic tolling on one highway here in Ontario (Highway 407). Toll rates vary by time of day. People complain about how much the tolls are, but not so much about government surveillance - the privacy concerns are more about the fact that the highway is operated by a private company who has access to government information.

Every now and then, Toronto muses about instituting a London-style congestion charge for vehicles going into the city core, but it hasn't gotten much traction so far.

One way that auto use does get priced by time of day is through parking rates.

 

[9-10ths_Penguin]

Do you have a vehicle safety check every year or two? If so your odometer reading is recorded

That's pretty uncommon in North America. Only a few states require annual vehicle inspections.

Here in Ontario, an inspection is only required when the car changes ownership.

 

[Heyo]

Renewables are more expensive than fossil fuels.

That information may be outdated. Have you looked at gas and petrol prices lately?

 

[ChristineM]

That's pretty uncommon in North America. Only a few states require annual vehicle inspections.

Here in Ontario, an inspection is only required when the car changes ownership.

Wow. The thought of all those possibly poorly maintained vehicles is kind of frightening

 

[F1fan]

Renewables are more expensive than fossil fuels.

Because of the cost in development, which comes with any new technology. Look at the price of computers over the decades. Back in the 80's and 90's a computer cost about $10,000. VCR's cost about $900 when they first came out to the commercial market. Costs go down over time. Fossil fuels are the old standard, but they are causing too much environmental harm to be viable to the future.

Decarbonisation is going to hurt billions of people. It will be looked on as a cruel joke by future generations.

Cars hurt the horse and buggy industry. Streaming hurt the video rental industry. The USA can't function globally if it is stuck in some nostalgic ideal that conservatives dream about for some reason. The resistance to both social and industrial progress is odd.

 

[It Aint Necessarily So]

Is electricity not taxed in your country?

My electricity comes from the sun. We pay nothing for it, including taxes.

Decarbonisation is going to hurt billions of people. It will be looked on as a cruel joke by future generations.

I think you have it backwards. Future generations will despise those that downplayed or obstructed progress in reducing carbon emissions. They already are:

I saw that meme yesterday in a Facebook thread. I was stunned to see the responses, about twenty, all hostile and dismissive. They were angry at that opinion.

 

[KW]

Your personal opinion is noted.
Meanwhile. India has the fastest growing renewable energy sector in the world. By 2030, 50% of its energy will be from non carbon sources. Extensive research and real world experience has shown renewable energy is the way for India and other countries to modernize its energy infrastructure, decrease deaths due to pollution, stop climate change catastrophies and have energy self sufficiency and energy affordability.

India’s clean energy transition is rapidly underway, benefiting the entire world – Analysis - IEA

If true, poor people will suffer due to high energy costs.

How many deaths is acceptable to push your green agend?

 

[ChristineM]

My electricity comes from the sun. We pay nothing for it, including taxes.

As does ours, in fact we sell some back to the power grid, income on which we are taxed ;-(
I did however mean that supplied by utility companies

 

[metis]

A tax based on car/truck weight can replace a gas tax. Here in Michigan, we use both.

 

[F1fan]

If true, poor people will suffer due to high energy costs.

How many deaths is acceptable to push your green agend?

Fewer than the burn, baby, burn fossil fuel agenda.

And if you are concerned about the poor affording vital electricity, then support subsidies for the poor, and pass the cost onto billionaires who live in 24 room mansions that are all air conditioned. They can afford a few more dollars off their balance sheets to help their fellow citizens as we adjust to renewable power generation.

 

[9-10ths_Penguin]

Wow. The thought of all those possibly poorly maintained vehicles is kind of frightening

Here in Ontario, cops will generally pull a car over if they see something amiss, but yes: there are things that wouldn't be visible to someone outside the car that might have problems.

Driving in Detroit is... interesting. More than once, I've seen cars drive by on the Interstate there without a hood.

 

[sayak83]

If true, poor people will suffer due to high energy costs.

How many deaths is acceptable to push your green agend?

Your agenda is already killing millions every year. The toll of fossil fuel industry exceeds 2 billion lives over the last 70 years. This death toll will accelerate as the decades go on.
Mine will roughly save 10 billion lives over this century. It will be the way the poor get clean, cheap energy to fuel their aspirations.
Just to bust your myths. Here is the cost of electricity from solar compared to coal. This is before any sort of subsidies or taxes.

Report: New solar is cheaper to build than to run existing coal plants in China, India and most of Europe

 

[Yerda]

It's worth noting that CO2 isn't the only substance that engines/refineries/powerplants produce when they burn fossil fuels. The particulate matter expelled is repsonsible for so many health problems that it must be costing us trillions in annual lost productivity worldwide and that's without considering the cost of repairing the damage to the environment.

Then we have:

Coal Ash Is More Radioactive Than Nuclear Waste

 

[Altfish]

That seems like it would require a lot of analysis and would be very complicated to calculate. IT probably would create a whole new bureaucracy to waste more money.

It would probably be easier to tax the charging units just like gasoline is taxed right at the pump.

This is a good question.

But how do you differentiate between electricity used for a car/van/whatever and electricity used to light and heat your home?
In UK we pay far more tax on vehicle fuel than on domestic use electric

 

[Altfish]

We have that for lorries (but it's flat and only on state roads and Autobahnen). I and most other drivers wouldn't like that for private cars because it could easily be turned into a surveillance system. So we pay a car tax and a petrol tax and lorries additionally pay toll. That helps to maintain all the road construction sites.

The issue with that is that the man who owns a car that only does (say) 10k a year pays the same as the man who does 60k a year.
You mention a petrol tax but I thought we were talking about EVs

 

[9-10ths_Penguin]

But how do you differentiate between electricity used for a car/van/whatever and electricity used to light and heat your home?
In UK we pay far more tax on vehicle fuel than on domestic use electric

You would have to have the charger on its own meter.

IMO, it's better to avoid proxies for the thing we care about regulating whenever we can.

If it's distance driven that imposes the cost on society or government, then tax based on distance driven. Taxing electricity consumption as a proxy for vehicle usage will end up creating similar problems to what happened with taxing gasoline as a proxy for vehicle usage.

I mean, even before plug-in electrics were a thing, we had hybrids that were throwing off the correlation between gas consumption and distance driven.

 

[9-10ths_Penguin]

The issue with that is that the man who owns a car that only does (say) 10k a year pays the same as the man who does 60k a year.
You mention a petrol tax but I thought we were talking about EVs

We can have a car tax that's proportional to the distance driven.

One transportation demand management strategy that gets talked about by experts in this field a fair bit is "pay-as-you-go" pricing: make your car tax, insurance, etc. - basically anything except fuel/energy and possibly maintenance - in a per-km or per-mile fee that gets charged only based on how much you use your car.

That way, the cost of car ownership and use becomes variable costs as much as possible instead of fixed costs, so it will have more of an impact on people's travel decisions.

 

[The Hammer]

As most of us know federal and state fuel taxes go to help pay for road infastruture. Question is how do you think EV owners should pay for road infastruture. With fuel tax the more miles you drove the more fuel you burned and the more tax you paid.

We pay more in registration and tabs every year, as opposed to fuel taxes. (We own a Prius)

Edit: and we could always raise electricity tax for those that have plug in hybrids, or full EVs.