At the end state will tax electricity same way to keep this wonderful tax income. No way to have cheap fuel, hydrogen, gas, etc will be taxed same way due to political reasons.
I don’t see a chance to ditch my car having family. It is clean, clean children seat, toys for travel, snacks for next trip, some water, some bad weather clothing. It is available all the time for me, no waiting, known condition.
But not clean electricity. The gas is taxed for the environmental reasons: it is endangering our planet. I don't know of any government taxing clean electricity.
Then why was it highly taxed before carbon emissions were considered a problem at all? I can tell you: because it's easy to tax (very much like estates).
Fuel duty which has nearly always been on fuel, but left in place and manipulated as a tax on hydrocarbons - £0.5795 per litre
VAT is then added on top of this price, which has been around since 1973 - currently 20%
Currently there is no tax on electricity used for road vehicles, but we do pay VAT on our Electricity bills so it's fair to assume that the government isn't losing out a huge amount of money by people switching to electric vehicles.
It's not so much the wonderful tax income, but the necessary acquiring of funds in order to maintain the roads.
This is paid by taxes on fuel. Somebody has to pay for new roads and maintenance, when that string of revenue falls away.
Herearound fuel taxes are earmarked for roads and potentially public transport projects. It can't be siphoned off into the general revenue bucket.
Also, with self-driving cars that are cheaper, I expect that people who now drive a car to the suburbs will move further out of town to get cheaper housing because a) driving is cheaper and b) self-driving would mean they can do things on their commute (work, watch Netflix, etc)
I think the uncomfortable truth is that, to fight climate change, we must give up some luxuries. Flying, driving a car, electricity, low priced almost disposable clothing, electronics gadgets, etc. must get more expensive.
In any case this article was about road congestion; not about saving the planet. When it comes to that, I don't really believe in technical martyrdom where people voluntarily choose to not do lots of things they would like to do as a solution. And making you feel good about you through voluntarily declining to do certain things is nice and nobel but more of a form of hedonism than a practical solution. Nothing wrong with that but it's not a scalable solution in the sense that in the bigger picture of 7-9 billion people not following your lead, it's going to be statistically meaningless/irrelevant unless you convince them otherwise at unprecedented scale.
Self driving cars potentially also increase the road capacity as cars would be able to coordinate their moves and make more efficient use of the road.
So, that's two ways electrical and autonomous vehicles could contribute to reducing road congestion, which is what this article seems to be about.
People letting their car drive around for hours because they can't find a parking space sounds a bit far fetched. Self parking cars could park on the edge of a city though and pick the driver up when needed. This would also enable autonomous charging and address that issue.