There are many options there, at the cost of making audits/complaints harder, such as e.g. only keeping GPS traces for a very short time (or not at all), and gradually overwrite more and more details, such as coordinates, reducing time precision, and finally consolidate to amounts owed. Those settings could be left under the control of the car owner as well, or let you dump a signed record of the precise data if you as the owner suspect inaccuracies and want to collect evidence, and then allow you to wipe the details from the device and only leave aggregate numbers.

The point is if the device is tamper-proof enough, you don't need it to record your movements, you just need it to monitor your movements and location with sufficient precision to decide what amounts should be added to running totals of tax.

Of course there is a risk some governments will decide they'd really like more detailed records.

I would assume that there is some law which requires the detailed data to be deleted, but I'm not sure about that.

Trucks have been doing it for years with transponders in the cabs. That's how when a semi fills up with fuel in one state and ends its trip in another state the state in between still gets some fuel tax to pay for road maintenance.

California already does that. (ZEVs pay a supplemental $100 annual fee.)

> But given CA's environmental goals, this would be counterproductive.

That is irrelevant, we are reaching a point where taxation on road miles driven vs. fueled used becomes unavoidable. What will wind up happening is that efficient and clean energy vehicles will still need to be taxed to account for usage, while less efficient vehicles will be taxed even more (to discourage use).

Internalizing the environmental externalities of operating them.

> If they are already paying more for fuel, doesn’t that already “tax” them more?

Fuel taxes are a mechanism for the additional (that is, beyond road usage, in the context of the grandparent post) taxes on inefficient vehicles.

> It seems like such a tax is regressive — rich people can buy new efficient cars more easily than poor people.

That's actually a reason you might want a method other than exclusively fuel taxes to implement the additional taxation (which may be via, say, a means tested tax subsidy for purchase of more efficient cars, rather than directly another extra tax on inefficient ones), because fuel taxes are operations taxes but don't directly effect purchases (they may be taken into account, but the poor who feel they need a car will often buy what they can afford up front even if it is not fully rational because real people tend to fall short of rationality in some predictable ways, and discounting deferred costs is a big one.)

Taxation serves two purposes: (a) to fund roads, and (b) to discourage society damaging behavior. For (a), we need to tax all vehicles, for (b), we need to tax some vehicles more than others.

> It seems like such a tax is regressive — rich people can buy new efficient cars more easily than poor people.

True. Perhaps the efficiency tax can be built into the initial new car purchase while the use tax is ongoing (those old cars will eventually fall apart or fail an emissions test anyways and be taken off the road). Anyways, these things can be worked out.

Here's the Norwegian tax authorities form for calculating taxes. While not all the descriptive text is available in English it seems most of the form is:

https://www.skatteetaten.no/en/person/duties/cars-and-other-...

The problem is that Uber/Lyft drivers "cruise" when the demand is slack rather than park.

So, for certain areas and times (generally about a hour before when that area is about to go from slack to busy), your street becomes a never-ending stream of ridesharing cars--generally doing stupid traffic maneuvers when they finally get summoned.

Isn't the whole point that the apps limit cruising time? I recall a study that claimdd the average traditional taxi cruises for half an hour on average between each trip. Are there plans to tax traditional cabs by an amount commensurate with their cruising time? If not, this legislation seems more like protectionism for traditional cabs.

Traditional taxis already pay a steep annual franchise fee to the city (even after it was cut down on recent years, probably in part because less-taxed rideshares reduced the level of franchise fee that was supportable).

In the presence of a substitute service not subject to them, they do not.

Actually, since there seems to be both a non-automatic approval process and a franchise fee, they don't really even without such competition; the approval process shields them from competition, the franchise fee is a pure cost. (Of course, there is a linkage between the two, but as long as the process is in place, incumbent taxi firms benefit from minimizing the fee.)