That makes a ton of sense except one killer flaw - literally killer.

People will put off buying new tires to dangerous extents. Yes Some people already do that, but adding any meaningful fee/tax on new tires will most certainly lead to people drawing out replacements and causing severe accidents.

Unfortunately many states (north eastern states that spread salt on their roads I’m looking at you) have rolled back their safety inspections - but this is the perfect application of a reasonable state-sanctioned activity. Tax tires, inspect vehicles, write fixit tickets, and let insurance handle the rest of the edge cases where deadbeats caused harm with their slick-tired jalopies.

Why have seatbelts and safety regulations if insurance can fix dead people?

This is not a very compelling argument. Things already cost money. We wouldn’t oppose a water tax because we were worried people might refuse to hydrate themselves once water was marginally more expensive. It might marginally exacerbate an existing problem, but the benefit of solving the target problem (funding roads fairly), even if imperfectly, is a much greater good

respectfully sir, I think that their argument might be a bit compelling. The reason why a water tax works but a tire tax wouldn't work is that well.. you can't live without water but you can live with bad tires until you don't (with accidents)

but people will simply just say, oh this wouldn't happen to me, life already has so many complications and people would simply postpone the tires.

Now granted, all of this depends upon the amount of taxes, the financial situations and greater analysis of the argument but I wouldn't throw mint5's argument completely.

It is funny but people will buy vice even if it might be taxed but people are simply less likely to do actual preventive measures depending on how much they cost.

I think its because we all have this belief that nothing bad might happen to us until it does and we take things for granted. There must be an effect named after it (survivorship bias? or we think we are the main character or something similar, superman effect?, not sure.)

Water tax is different in many ways, and a bad comparison. Also that water tax phrasing is bizarre, like saying people in famine areas are being silly for refusing to buy food on the moral principle of high cost.

Ignoring the other flaws with analogy, not drinking mostly affects the person and their family. Car accidents affect the primary party. But often also a person chosen at random in a second car. Does a person choosing to not drink, ignoring the other flaws of the analogy, make a random second person die of thirst?

My EV eats tires at a high rate that's not consistent with other cars in its size class.

It also weighs only 2650 pounds, nearly half that of many other passenger vehicles on the road today.

But my car is weird, not at all common in the United States, and no longer manufactured.

Weird indeed! Smart EQ Fortwo?

If yes, RWD vs AWD is your answer, combined with wider rear tires.

BMW i3 (2014-2021 version)

Carbon fiber reinforced plastic. Wagon-wheel tires, 155mm wide.

My 2020 one includes the scooter motor generator, a petrol "range extender", and weighs a bit more, slightly less than 3,000 pounds.

Skinny tires and I can go a mix of highway and city driving and get 5.1 miles per kWh.

But the tires are expensive and don't last.

Dude, that’s an even cooler Chevy Volt!

I could understand shying away from admitting you drive a Smart car - this is just neat.

Both the Chevy Volt (as in Volta, not Bolt as in... bolt) and the BMW i3 with the Range Extender are "series" hybrids: the petrol engine has no mechanical connection to the wheels. It only charges the battery.

In the past six months, we've seen official recognition of this setup as a distinct form of car, "eREV".

Some recent models from China mean that in some markets, you can buy a new series hybrid.

But I'm a series hybrid hipster.

On weight. 4th power of weight, road damage is proportional to 4th power of weight.

Is tire damage proportional to the same figure? If so, heavier cars will naturally require more tire replacements and tire tax collection will more or less match contribution to road wear

... In my experience, not necessarily, especially when it comes to good EV driving habits and a decently designed EV.

By that I mean, if you're driving an EV (or hybrid, to a large extent) properly you are going to be relying on regen braking by default, and if the EV is smart enough, it's going to do at least some limiting of power delivery to minimize wheel skip/etc on even aggressive acceleration.

As anecdata, my Hybrid weighs about 20% more than my first car, yet I've gotten more miles out of my tires than I did on that old Saturn. [0]

Said hybrid weighs close to a Model 3.

[0] - The Subaru doesn't have good data here, because it has the worst luck for killing a tire mid-life with a sidewall puncture/damage and then requires replacing all 4 anyway.

Weight is only one dimension. What matters is weight and mileage. Our family has two cars but we drive less combined than a typical single person in our area.

Where that gets problematic is you can't easily validate mileage for something like an online renewal.

I will say you did give me a fun idea however; you could in theory set up a kiosk system where scanning renewal notice + license[0] and get some sort of OBD2 plug-in device, that could record the mileage+vin+other data (to harden against faking attacks[1]) and then you take it back to the kiosk to confirm mileage.

IDK, probably not the best way to do it but maybe there's a good way to handle this sort of scenario.

[0] - In case you abscond with the dispensed device for some reason...

[1] - But this is possibly where it falls apart...

> On weight. 4th power of weight, road damage is proportional to 4th power of weight.

Yup. Which is why damage due to personal vehicles, even heavy EV ones (heavy due to the batteries), is a rounding error in road damage. A single semi passing on a road shall damage it more than one million regular cars. Something insane like that.

It's totally obvious on the three-lanes european highways: the leftmost lane is never deformed like the right-most lane is. And the rightmost lane is deformed on two bands: precisely where the tires of the semis are passing.

Politicians, worldwide, always prone to steal from people, have of course planned everything: WLTP (Worldwide Harmonised Light Vehicles Test Procedure), are going to make sure they rip everybody off.

The scam is beautiful: in the EU for example... Make sure everybody switches to EV vehicles, then make sure everybody repeats "road damage is proportional to 4th power of weight" (with conveniently ignoring the issue of trucks weight), so that then you can tax vehicles that are now heavy.

While, of course, making sure that electricity prices are through the roof.

We're already at a point, in some EU countries, where superchargers on the highways cost more money than a gasoline car for the same mileage.

A tax on tires would at least make some sense. But inventing a tax on weight now that cars have heavy EV batteries is just petty.

Governments don't need to "scam" people for money, and only the exceptionally useless ones attempt to "steal from people", stealing from people is corruption, not taxation, they have direct power to take whatever they want whenever they deem necessary and spend it however they want (modulo constitutional rules). Note that I'm not denying the existence of corruption here, that would be a much stronger claim, but you'd have to make a case that somehow the corruption is focussed on promoting a new novel kind of vehicle and rather than all the existing ones which have support from the existing stakeholders in manufacturing and fuel supply and presumably more cash for bribes and stuff.

Even if governments were as your rhetoric says, they have no specific desire for electricity prices to be "through the roof", as energy in general is foundational to industrial performance in the same way food is foundational to human performance. This is why gulf states, which are extremely un-democratic, set fixed (and low) fuel prices in the 1960s and only reformed their subsidies rather than removing them entirely in the 2010s.

> We're already at a point, in some EU countries, where superchargers on the highways cost more money than a gasoline car for the same mileage.

I think that says more about the superchargers than the governments.

Commercial trucks and logistic-dependent firms like Amazon would have a fit, over losing this entitlement.

tires all wear in different ways and for different reasons.

What reasons wouldn’t also reflect wear against the roads though? I think the idea is to impose a price based on wearing the roads, and a tire tax pretty elegantly approximates that I think

I'll give a fun one.

On a lot (really most) of 4WD/AWD drive vehicles, but especially those with 'full-time' (cries in Subaru), if you need to replace one tire 20k miles in (i.e. due to a road hazard etc) you then have to replace the entire set to avoid damaging the drivetrain.

I suppose in theory you could try to 'trust' shops to properly pro-rate such scenarios, however I'm skeptical that it could be implemented in a trustworthy way without being more trouble than it's worth.

> if you need to replace one tire 20k miles in (i.e. due to a road hazard etc) you then have to replace the entire set to avoid damaging the drivetrain

Re-sell them to other vehicle operators that don’t need to worry about that to utilize the remaining life? Would be easier if we had more 3 wheelers but at least 2 tires can be sold as a set. And not extremely difficult to match sets of 3 odds together with another 3 odds if you have some infrastructure to get some network effects.

Cuz i’m sure the shop is doing that.

why do people think this ? you just shave a new tire down to the diameter of the existing tires.

Because while this is 100% a thing and anyone who has taken a vehicle to the track knows this, Les Schwab or Discount Tire aren't doing this for you.

Yeah I'll admit I've never seen a shop I've gone to offer that as a service; the closest I've gotten is getting the shop's extended warranty on the tires, and then they'll pro-rate the remaining tires on replacement. Still had to pay labor tho.

What kind of tire shops should I look for? Smaller ones or specialty ones?

Independent tire shops without known brands and/or racing-oriented stores.

> What reasons wouldn’t also reflect wear against the roads though?

Off-road driving.

Put on your dyed tires for that. Don’t get caught driving on the road with them!

cheap tires wear faster than expensive ones in the same category tire. should people who can’t afford slow wearing tires or repaired/used tires be effectively charged more than someone who can afford top of the line?

additionally, most people have probably paid to replace tires worn due to imbalance or other issues. how would that be accounted for?

Gas tax also is not well calibrated to road wear.

Not necessarily, although one can argue that it's an attempt to deter gas guzzler vehicles.

And with my kind of luck, I replace about 2-3 tires in the life span of a set due to road hazards.