Then you just create a different problem, or in case of Denmark, contribute to an existing one. You're going to make the poor worse of. Taxing on kilometers driven is unfairly hard towards those who cannot afford to live close to their place of employment.

To the wealthy it won't matter much if you tax the purchase of the car or the kilometers driven. Those making below the average salary are normally excluded from living in the center of the cities, and is in some cases even forced outside the bus routes. Also Danish public transit is notoriously bad outside the four largest cities.

> Then you just create a different problem, or in case of Denmark, contribute to an existing one. You're going to make the poor worse of. Taxing on kilometers driven is unfairly hard towards those who cannot afford to live close to their place of employment.

So is there a use for car taxes at all? We could always just tax the rich directly, if we don't care about tying the tax amount to road usage.

How is it any worse than the current tax on gas, though?

Taxing fuel it's better as it correlates quite well with engine size and usage and therefore pollution.

It's not, but it is different to taxing the sales price of a new car, which was how I understood the idea.

I don't know how it in in Denmark, but wealthy people often live in nice houses in the suburbs and commute by car. Here in Berlin at least that is the case. The fuel taxes are offset by tax deductions for commuter miles though.

With the way house prices are going, Amsterdam is rapidly turning into a city for rich people. There's a lot of rent-controlled housing, but waiting lists are more than 8 years on average. It's mostly the outskirts that are affordable, but not the center or the good neighbourhoods surrounding the center.

Well that true in Denmark as well, but both the city centers and the suburbs are pretty expensive, so risk getting pushed past those, and then you start getting into areas where public transport is basically non-existing.

People do drive abroad you know. If I do most(or any percentage) of my miles abroad why would I pay tax on those miles where the car is registered? Meantime, I buy the fuel in those other countries, paying tax there.

No idea how to solve that for electric vehicles. Presumably still at the point of charging.

The consensus is around some sort of road pricing either through ANPR cameras or telematic boxes.

Fuel duty revenue in the UK is £28billion. That's a big hole to fill.

At the moment driving electric cars is so cheap because we buy electricity at domestic prices. It's as if we were buying utility oil(red diesel) for cars - then it would be stupidly cheap, no? There's a good reason it has been made illegal and you can't use heating oil for your car even though technically it would work just as well.

I suspect that eventually you will be able to charge your electric car only from an approved charger that bills you a higher-rate car tariff, just like you can only use fuel sold at a petrol station in your car.

As for the telematics - excuse me saying so, but the UK government can fuck off with suggesting even more surveillance, it's hard to fight off insurers installing telematics boxes as it is already.

I get the concern about surveillence. But I can see some amazing benefits of treating cars and the road as a single connected system. You could hold vehicles at the journey start point until space on the road opens up. Or adjust speed limits in real time depending on conditions. And maybe even remove traffic calming by modifying user speeds. The free-for-all we have now is hopelessly disfunctional and drivers suffer from that.

Absolutely, and I agree with this sci-fi idea of an interconnected system which has only safety of everyone as a goal and everyone is better off for it. If that's possible, I'm happy to have it implemented tomorrow.

But right now as it stands currently, telematics boxes are nothing else but a greedy attempt to get more cash out of drivers - they collect proprietary data, ran through secret algorithms, to secretly decide whether your insurance should go up or not. Try getting a letter from your insurer telling you that your insurance will go up due to your "driving style" and then ask if they can explain what they mean by that. They can't. "the computer said so" is an absolutely fantastic excuse for these companies to make more money and I'm extremely cynical about it, even if we ignore the entire surveillance aspect for a second. The whole idea needs a lot more regulation/openness to be acceptable.

Are you suggesting the Danish should be taxed for travelling they might well have done in Sweden?

If the car was registered in Sweden they'd be paying tax there. If the per-mile tax is similar and there are a similar number of Danes driving in Sweden and Swedes driving in Denmark it evens out.

"The Danes" or "the Danish citizen".

"Danish" is an adjective or a cake.