I figure it’s semi trucks that do almost all the road damage. We could just tax the trucks, but that would just get passed along in higher prices for everything. So might as well pay for road repair out of the general fund than have special taxes.

They do, but it's priced in. Many states have weigh stations as part of enforcing the existing taxation through diesel and licensing.

They also have to go through 3x the registration effort, and do it in every state they drive in.

> and do it in every state they drive in.

Not anymore. You just get an IFTA sticker and apportioned plates.

No, they all just get registered in Maine which supposedly has pretty lax rules on Semis

I travel a lot, and see semis from most states, and commercial pickup haulers from all states. They say NJ, NY, KY, and UT, are especially penurious about additional registration and licensing.

No, externalities should be priced in where practical otherwise the market will be more inefficient, which in this case means the public footing an unnecessarily high road repair bill.

Diesel is already taxed at a higher rate than gasoline.

A diesel truck that has three times the pressure on the road and easily ten to fifteen times the total weight, while getting about 1/3rd the gas mileage of the average US passenger vehicle.

Given the (unsupported) claim that a EV wears the road significantly more than a gasoline car for what amounts to shouldn't we expect that a vehicle exerting three times the pressure on the road should pay more per mile than 'just' 3x what you and I do in our gas passenger cars?

> Given the (unsupported) claim that a EV wears the road significantly more than a gasoline car

Wear on the road is a function of weight. It’s really simple and uncontroversial. An EV generally weighs more than an ICE of equivalent size.

Hopefully, the federal push to install tons of charging stations will usher in useful EVs with smaller batteries, lowering weight.

I still think this is BS, considering trucks are causing 2500 times [0] more damage than gas cars and are certainly not bringing tax income proportionally to this. Why should EV then?

[0] https://www.insidescience.org/news/how-much-damage-do-heavy-...

This seems like a weird argument to make. We either pay collectively more for taxes for the roads we use, or collectively we pay WAY more for food, materials, and basically everything else if we tax trucks proportionally. Large trucks are carrying stuff, and the cost of that stuff is going to be directly associated with the cost of logistics.

Yes, some states haven't figured out what that looks like, but I really don't think the right answer is to dump all that cost on truckers. I would rather pay more for my car's operational tax, increased EV tax or existing gas tax on ICE, than disproportionately affect the price of groceries for someone living paycheck to paycheck.

Doesn’t this assume that the cost will not effect behavior? If trucking logistics becomes more expensive to properly account for the externalities, wouldn’t companies be more motivated to find more cost efficient methods. I’m sure there are plenty of items that could be shipped by rail, but aren’t because trucking is currently cheaper for the individual company, while the cost in road damage, pollution, greenhouse gasses, increased traffic, etc. are paid by everyone else.

As for disproportionately affecting the poor, sales taxes (like on groceries and other goods) and excise taxes (like on gas) are exactly the regressive taxation systems that burden the very people living paycheck to paycheck. Shifting the tax burden from skimming off the top for the people spending all their income on daily necessities, towards companies paying the full cost of their chosen operations, would give the poor more buying power and allow market forces to find and utilize the most effective and efficient means to provide services instead of the cheapest means that are only cheap because they are subsidized by everyone else.

I think you misunderstood my argument. I'm not saying vehicles should be taxed proportionally to road usage, on this I don't have an opinion. I'm saying either you do this for all vehicles or none. You cannot say "EV vehicles pay proportionally but trucks not" without clearly being biased against EV (whatever the reasons).

The increase in damage due to the higher weight is insignificant if semis and other heavy vehicles are allowed on that road.

Also you could just get a slightly smaller cars since EVs tend to be a bit more space efficient.

Semis aren't typically driving down suburbia or in left lanes on highways.

Noting the increased road damage isn't an attack on EVs, it's a call to be smarter about infrastructure:.

> Given the (unsupported) claim that a EV wears the road significantly more than a gasoline car

This is an unambiguously, heavily supported claim. By states, car makers, the federal government, and third party analysis firms. It's incredibly uncontroversial. It's even got a name, and associated math: it's called the Fourth Power Law https://www.insidescience.org/news/how-much-damage-do-heavy-...

> shouldn't we expect that a vehicle exerting three times the pressure on the road should pay more per mile than 'just' 3x what you and I do in our gas passenger cars

Gas taxes make up a relatively small part of the cost of gas. If you run the numbers, you'll find that it's maybe closer to around 3.5-4x for most passenger EVs. At scale, that becomes a problem, but at the individual level, it's still a relatively small amount - and certainly less than the cost of gas.

> This is an unambiguously, heavily supported claim.

Your source claims no such thing. EVs may be heavier than equivalent ICE cars, but an electric Smart (the brand) is going to do less damage than a loaded Ford F150.

Tax the weight, not a shitty proxy for weight.

…and an F150 uses more fuel than a car.

Your comparison is misleading. Compare an ICE car to an EV car, not the lightest EV to the heaviest ICE.

That was exactly their point. You can't use 'EV' to mean heavier vehicle across the board.

> This is an unambiguously, heavily supported claim.

It is pretty much insignificant increase on road wear vs what trucks put on it?

Yes, but HGVs don't go onto residential roads.

If you meant SUVs or pick-ups by trucks yeah, insignificant and a bad proxy for weight anyway. No point in taxing EVs when what you need to tax is weight.

The fourth power law is uncontroversial, the fact that on average (or just take per model) EVs wear more than your "average ICE car" (especially as SUVs are the average now) is not

> Gas taxes make up a relatively small part of the cost of gas

Over in the EU it seems that taxes and duties represent at least half of the cost of petrol, more in some member states

https://www.statista.com/statistics/937796/pump-price-and-ta...

Q: How are governments going to replace this?

> Q: How are governments going to replace this?

Add a supplemental registration tax to EVs and hybrids to make up the cost of consuming less fuel. Of course, taxes never go away, so enjoy this new tax as we enter an electric future.

> Add a supplemental registration tax to EVs and hybrids to make up the cost of consuming less fuel

Q: How much fuel duty and tax does the average ICE vehicle (or rather, its driver) contribute?

I did some back-of-napkin math and came up with a figure of €500

I used to have a Dodge 2500 diesel it weighed 4,000kg. For comparison an EV Tesla Model X is 2,500kg. a non-EV Toyota Camry is 1,500kg.

I still have the dents in my driveway pavement!

"Fuel duty is currently levied at a flat rate of 52.95p per litre for both petrol and diesel, while VAT at 20% is then charged on both the product price and the duty."

https://racfoundation.org/data/percentage-uk-pump-price-whic...

In the US, where Utah is located, diesel is taxed at a higher rate: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e9/Gasoline...

I figured it was implied since we were talking about the US, but context has a way of collapsing in threaded conversations. Thanks for bringing it back around.

You're right about semis. The most cost effective thing for keeping the roads better is weigh stations open all the time.

However, EVs cause around 2x more damage to roads than non EVs.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/06/26/pothole-electric...

Wait til the semi EVs hit the road!

EVs also have significantly higher particulate emissions due to increased tire wear.

You know you linked to a fictional news site, right?

Terrible source, yes, but it happens to be at least roughly on point in this instance; if my dim recall of the relevant engineering is correct, road damage grows quadratically to the pressure exerted on the road by tires, and EVs are typically nearly twice as heavy as ICE vehicles.

> and EVs are typically nearly twice as heavy as ICE vehicles.

A 3-series BMW clocks in at 1700-2255 kg. A comparable Tesla Model Y clocks in at 1778-2003 kg (from empty to fully loaded).

2255kg is the maximum load, and 1700kg is not at all an ordinary car weight; hatchbacks are often closer to 650 and my sedan is barely over 1000.

You could argue that those aren’t luxury vehicles, but downmarket EVs need to be heavy too, because batteries do not match the energy density of petrol.

Myself, I’m replacing nearly every car trip with biking where feasible (young kids make that challenging, admittedly, but the car doesn’t see a ton of use these days).

I think your figures are off. What hatchback only weighs 600kg? What sedan only weighs 1000kg?

Hrm, digging deeper and you're right, I'm a little light - hatchbacks are closer to 1000 and the commodore sedan starts at 1370.

Kei cars? The Citroën AX was about 700kg.

Those are both massive cars. Under a ton is more typical and reasonable.

Here in Germany, a 3-series BMW is the standard middle class sedan. Certainly less weight than most SUVs.

Under a ton?! Do you mean under 1000 kg? How do you figure?

The Dacia Sandero, one of the smallest cars I can think of here in France, that's also supposed to be cheap so doesn't have a lot of... anything, has a curb weight of 1,025–1,204 kg (2,260–2,654 lb) according to wikipedia [0].

The previous generation Renault Clio, which is a small city car, weighed around 1000 kg, too (980 at the lowest). [1]. Wikipedia doesn't have data for the current generation, which is somewhat bigger physically.

---

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dacia_Sandero

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renault_Clio#Fourth_generation...

Our country’s Sandero is actually a bit big for the B segment. The Polo, Corsa and Fiesta are all a bit smaller and lighter, at least the previous generation. You’re right about the current generation, though. Not that many on the streets, but they generally are a bit over a ton.

At least the popular A segment cars like the Aygo, Up or 500 still tend to be under a ton.

Sadly even heavier cars are becoming more popular, so in the future a ton will be far from the median.

>A 3-series BMW clocks in at 1700-2255 kg. A comparable Tesla Model Y clocks in at 1778-2003 kg (from empty to fully loaded).

A brand new 330i is 3500lbs. A Model Y is 4500lbs. That's a 28% increase in weight for a similar size car.

A Honda Civic is 3100lbs in full trim. A 530i is 3800lbs. My VW SUV is only 3850lbs.

That means more tire wear and more road wear. Are we at the point where EV fans are going to deny that EVs are far heavier?

> A brand new 330i is 3500lbs. A Model Y is 4500lbs. That's a 28% increase in weight for a similar size car.

GP said "and EVs are typically nearly twice as heavy as ICE vehicles"

Also I'm sure you know that 330i is a sedan. Model Y is a SUV. They are not similar. A BMW similar to Model Y would be X3. it's weight is 4150lbs.

Did you know that BMW series 7 is around 4720lbs, compared to 4790lbs of a model S?

EV is heavier than ICE. That's never been a question. EV is gentler to the environment despite the weight.

They are clearly heavier which causes more wear and tear. The estimation that they are nearly twice as heavy is inaccurate. Do you agree with these statements?

Believe it or not, it's proportional to the fourth power (!) of the axle load: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_power_law

Yeah, that doesn't work, though. It makes no sense mathematically and can be shown by a simple experiment to break down in practice.

Is “nah I don’t think so” really a powerful counterargument to a page with a list of academic and government citations offering support of its claims?

Well, it's very very simple.

Does a sharp pointy thing poke a hole in a surface more easily or less easily than a big flat thing?

The "list of academic and government citations" is all just finger-in-the-air unscientific "we think it works like this because it fits our primary school child view of the world".

EVs are not double the weight of comparable ICE vehicles. Yes, they are heavier -- but not 100% heavier.

Tax the semi trucks and it makes it more economical to use rail freight.

Hiding the externalities is somewhat communist.

IMO gas and diesel vehicles should pay a higher tax for all the air pollution they create that the public has to clean up or deal with (in terms of adverse health effects, health care, etc).

> Road taxes are often use-based, where gasoline is the way they extract "use" taxes.

26% of road funds come from gas taxes; 11 percent from tolls, another 25% from the federal government: https://www.urban.org/policy-centers/cross-center-initiative...

Now, about those "paying their fair share of 25% of the cost of the roads" gas taxes: In Utah, the gas tax was $0.245 in 1997. Today it's $0.34, when adjusting for inflation alone it should be $0.46, so drivers have received what amounts to a 25% tax reduction in the last ~30 years. The federal gas tax hasn't been raised in thirty years. So there's another tax break drivers have gotten.

That's just inflation. Average fuel economy has risen from 18mpg to over 22, which means per mile drivers are paying on average 20% less of "their fair share" due to mileage increases alone.

So it's a bit weird that suddenly people in gas cars are getting high and mighty about EV owners "not paying their fair share."

> EVs also wear roads more than gas cars do, on average, because of their higher rate. And it's not linear wear per pound, either.

The Ford F150, which is the most popular "car" sold in America, is between 4,069 and 5,697 pounds.

A Tesla Model 3 is 3,862 to 4,048 lbs. A Chevy Bolt is ~3600lb.

Yet..who gets taxed more by Utah? Does Utah give people with small 3000lb gas cars a tax break, and penalize 5,000lb pickup truck owners?

Also, where were all these concerns about increased road wear on budgets when American purchasing trends tilted toward larger and heavier SUVs and pickups? Average vehicle weight has risen 10%+ since 1990.

EVs start to get popular and suddenly now everyone's very concerned about...road wear?

Bish, please.

Utah didn't want to raise the gas tax (it's a political third rail) so they relied on their extremely stupid electorate to buy up the myth that drivers in gas cars are "paying their fair share" and instituted a punitive tax on EVs which Dumb Yokel Bob fully supports because it's sticking it to those "libruhls in them fuckin' priuses an shit", believing everything he hears on conservative radio about EVs (for example, that they 'cost' more CO2 to make than a regular car. Which is true....until around 14,000 miles into ownership when the EV breaks even compared to a gas car.)

>> Does Utah give people with small 3000lb gas cars a tax break, and penalize 5,000lb pickup truck owners?

Yes, if your car has less weight you use less gas and therefore have a “tax break” compared to the guy on the 5,000lb truck.

>> EVs start to get popular and suddenly now everyone's very concerned about...road wear?

Would it be better to ignore the problem?

Yes, in the near term it absolutely would because we need to decarbonize transport. Or put another way, fuel taxes are an impromptu way of taxing the huge externalities of ICE vehicles in terms of carbon emissions and exhaust, and unless those taxes are increased, adding special EV-only fees and taxes (which many states already have at much higher rates than the state fuel tax) will actually do the opposite, effectively negating this taxation of externalities that already exists.

> Would it be better to ignore the problem?

Would it be better to focus on the larger problem, rather than distract with a symbolic but ultimately meaningless and punitive "solution"? Yes, it would be better to ignore it for now and focus on adjusting the gas tax to properly reflect how fuel efficiency increases allow for less and less gas to be bought for heavier and heavier weight. To skip over everything noted in the OP comment that hasn't been done to have ICE drivers "pay their fair share" only to then to focus on the tiny minority of EV drivers rings pretty hollow.

>if your car has less weight you use less gas and therefore have a “tax break” compared to the guy on the 5,000lb truck.

What if you have an older and less fuel efficient car? Why should new car buyers get a tax break vs older car owners when it is vehicle weight that is doing the road damage? Would it be better to ignore the problem?

California has the nations highest gas taxes yet worst roads...

https://www.kiplinger.com/taxes/state-tax/603259/states-with...

https://ktla.com/news/california/these-states-have-the-rough...

This is why I advocate for a gross vehicle weight rating and vehicle miles traveled tax, regardless of energy source (although gas should still be taxed on its own). GWVR and VMT pretty much measure how much impact a car has on road maintenance, so it makes sense to charge heavier vehicles and vehicles that drive more, more.

I think it even makes sense for semis, the cost may go up for goods slightly as they pass that cost onto customers, but we'd be paying less in federal taxes for roads, less in property taxes for roads, and if you drive less (good for health, environment, etc) you'll likely be saving money. It also more accurately taxes EVs with ICEs based on road wear and tear instead of all these haphazard ideas.

Just tax the roads themselves. Wear is the problem after all, disincentivise it.

where are those damn flying cars they promised

> This is why I advocate for a gross vehicle weight rating and vehicle miles traveled tax

The problem is, while that works out on highways and other federally owned road, the distribution on state or county/city level is almost impossible. Say you have a trucking company doing regional service and one doing interstate transport - both their fleets will have similar driven miles because economically, companies want their many-hundred-thousand-dollar assets to be on the road as long as traffic safety laws allow. Now, assuming they both pay the same mile tax to the state... the state makes an insane profit on the interstate trucking company given that only a low percentage of the miles driven were happening on that state's roads, with the clear majority being on federal highways and other states' roads.

I disagree.

Roads are a public good.

Having a road available to use, is worth almost as much as actually using it.

Not to mention all the positive externalities of a better connected country (more trade, business, economic growth).

I use a road in my 1100kg car, you use it in your 2200kg car. You cause 8 times the damage. Do you generate 8 times the positive externalities?

Yes?

The positive externalities created by trucks shipping food into cities massively outweigh almost all passenger traffic.

So charging by weight/road damage makes no sense.

The truck that the parent poster refers to is not a 16-wheeler or panel truck used for commercial purposes, but someone's impeccably clean F-150 that hasn't hauled anything in 2+ years

Do you eat red meat ? sugary drinks ? do you exercise ? Do you have XYZ gene ?

You're costing X times more to the system because you're diabetic/obese/predisposed ? You should pay more!

That's how it sounds, and if we want to live like that we can go back to cavemen times, because we didn't built societies to play this silly game

Maybe we should go back to having private roads then, and have people who own the roads decide.

Instead of that, they could mandate meters on the charging stations that add a surcharge to the electricity. That would be less invasive, and be analogous to how they collect usage fees by taxing gas.

There is a general legal principle that the state must use the least intrusive means to accomplish a goal. A lawsuit might force a change.

Except you can charge from every single outlet.

Sounds like tax evasion.

You still need a charger/adapter between the outlet and the vehicle. Perhaps build the meter into the vehicles charging port.

You have got to be kidding me. Next you’ll say that properly inflating your tires is “tax evasion” because you’ll burn less gas.

In my country you pay an anual fee for having a vehicle, like property tax but for vehicles. The larger the vehicle, more you pay, discount if you have an EV (no emissions). It's not that difficult.

Which is crazy. Use a car for 500 miles a year you pay the same as someone using it for 50,000 miles a year

Just charge on the odometer reading each year. 3p a mile or whatever. Maybe charge more based on weight.

Power and fuel are still taxed on usage basis. There is no real difference except that road maintenance is also funded by a basic fee. It's a two way system.

Which is basically what we do in NZ. We have Road User Charges (RUC) that you buy in advance. We put road tax on petrol, so petrol vehicles don't pay RUCs. But no road tax on diesel, because tractors and other machinery that doesn't go on public roads. So we just extend the same RUC system for diesel vehicles to EVs.

(But not yet because we were incentivising EV up take. RUCs for EVs will be required in 2024 I believe.)

EV drivers more than make this up by not having nearly as many externalities (pollution) as gas drivers. Gas drivers seem to always conveniently forget those real societal costs when they're trying to talk about "fairness".

That still doesn't pay for roads. I love EVs and think their use should be more broadly encouraged, but the gas tax made for a very simple use tax and it's not obvious how one would replace it to do the same thing for EVs.

Simply saying EVs are so much better for the environment that they don't need to pay for roads at all seems a little short sighted.

>it's not obvious how one would replace it to do the same thing for EVs.

Taxing tires would work. Also, mileage is already recorded during vehicle inspections. That could be used to calculate tax but would be more open to fraud.

I don't want tires to be taxed, it would incentivize people to use tires more than they would do today, and that is bad news for traffic safety. Not only for themselves but for other people on the road too.

> by not having nearly as many externalities (pollution) as gas drivers

Depend where you get your electricity from. Also most of car pollution comes from tires and brake dust, which EV create more of given their weight and torque

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/jun/03/car-tyre...

See, we can play this silly game all day long or just all chip in.

The article you linked is specifically talking about particle emissions, not anything gaseous. If it included the negative externalities of all emissions (CO2, NOx's too), it might paint a different picture.

That’s a very cute argument, but it doesn’t pay for the roads.

Also, having lived in a city I can tell you that brake dust and tire wear is also a big part of car pollution.

Unless you want 100% toll roads, we need to come up with fair-ish way to tax EV road use.

How much fuel-tax revenue do we think Utah is recovering from EV drivers?

I would guess that we are talking about very small numbers -- certainly under 5% of drivers.[1] Whatever principle Utah is asserting to "recover" fuel taxes from EV drivers isn't making much of a difference.

At the same time, the Utah policy is clearly discouraging EV adoption.

> EVs also wear roads more than gas cars do, on average, because of their higher weight.

We are talking about a small presence in the automobile market. If everyone were to drive a Tesla, then yes we would have more heavy passenger cars on the road.

For example, a 2023 Honda Civic weighs between 1,429 kg and 1,517 kg. One best-selling SUV, the Toyota RAV4, weighs 1755 kg.

But the most popular type of vehicle in the US (and in Utah) by sales is the pick-up truck. The top three pick-up trucks each weigh about 2500 kg.

If we are going to start quibbling about weight this way, we will need to recognise that drivers of vehicles should be taxed according to their obesity to maintain our roadways.

[1] https://electrek.co/2022/08/24/current-ev-registrations-in-t...

ICE vehicles do pay taxes by weight. Larger vehicles use more fuel and pay more taxes.

But this isn't necessarily proportional to the amount of wear-and-tear they cause on roads.

If you want true accuracy you're going to need to track the car 24/7 which would be unpopular.

Or worse - it could be popular.

> And it's not linear wear per pound, either.

If it's not linear then the difference between a 4000 lbs car vs a 3000 lbs one is nothing compared to the damage done by a loaded 80 000 lbs truck.

What I notice, on european highways: it's always the rightmost lane that is deformed. The leftmost lane is never deformed. The aquaplanning risks due to water present in two bands on the lane is always on the rightmost lane. Always, always, always.

Why? Because the rightmost lane is the one trucks do use.

Where I live atm, in the middle of nowhere, there are two things deforming the road: heavy vehicles (I'm not talking about 4000 lbs cars here but tractors / trucks) and... Tree roots. Most of the patches made on the road are due to tree roots lifting the road's concrete.

My hunch is that the wear caused by both ic and ev cars is negligible comared to trucks. All road use taxes, including gas, subsidize heavy trucking.