Any schlub can slip the tech at your autoshop a $20 to misread the odometer. Need more work to fake a digital reading.

This is all around the bigger issue of how we fund road work: often it's done with a state tax on gasoline sales, so the more you use the roads the more you pay for them. Worked great, reasonably fair, even somewhat punished heavier vehicles (road wear is proportional something more-than-linear vs weight, and heavier cars generally need more gas). And then those pesky non-gas electrics came onto the scene.

So you now you have a system and a bureaucracy funded by a not-terrible pay-as-you-go tax, and suddenly lots of users don't need the thing your taxing. What's a bureaucracy to do?

Well, if you're in a state that thinks EV's are woke propaganda and an existential threat to your truck-based manliness, simple: you charge absurd annual registration fees and say "well, we gotta get the equivalent road tax somehow, so lets do it all at once upfront and ignore any of the equity talk about turning a pay-as-you-go into a massive flat upfront fee because fuck the plebs."

Other states say "alright alright, we can split this registration fee into 4 quarterly installments" and they deal with the extra paperwork of now "keeping your registration up to date" being much more complicated.

No sympathies for Orwellian government-must-observe-your-odometer-at-all-times, but I also see how it's a bureaucracy that was built around one system that worked ok struggling to adapt to a new technology.

Or they can just do what Georgia does and charge an insane yearly fee from non-gas vehicles. GA charges 29.10 cent gas tax, and my Model Y "Alternative Fuel Vehicle Fee" is $210 yearly. I would need to buy an equivalent 721 gallons of gas yearly to match that fee, which is over 20k miles a year on a gas car (assuming 30mpg).

>Well, if you're in a state that thinks EV's are woke propaganda

The opposite is true. Washington state has the highest EV registration fee in the nation and the governor ran on a platform of climate change.

It gets weirder. In my state (Oregon) it's not even the government that is gathering the data, it's a third party that's authorized by the government. I assume the government gets that data, but I also assume that the 3rd party is happily allowed to correlated and package the data to sell how it sees it (that may not be fair, but there were no explicit statements of privacy safety on the sites...)

There are 3 companies that do it. Only one of them will do a non-GPS-based system, but it still requires a dongle plugged in and is limited to a small set of vehicles. I'm not really sure why.

To further complicate things, do I choose the Insurance dongle to save money on insurance, or the EV registration dongle, to save money on vehicle registration? AFAICT, they don't stack.

Can’t we just tax tyres instead of gas?

My insurance just asks me for a picture of my odometer once a year.