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.