There is a fundamental truth you have to understand about car companies:They do not exist to make cars. They exist to make money. That distinction, analyst Kevin Tynan tells me, is why they’re not really interested in making affordable electric vehicles.
Perhaps that’s an oversimplification. Tynan is the director of research at an auto-dealer-focused investment bank, the Presidio Group, with decades of experience as an analyst at firms like Bloomberg Intelligence. What he means isn’t that automakers have no interest in affordable products. It’s that their interest begins and ends with winning customers who will eventually buy more expensive, higher-margin products.
One of the auto industry’s dirtiest secrets is that at scale, it doesn’t cost that much more to make a bigger, more expensive than a smaller and cheaper one. But they can charge you a lot more for the former, which makes this a game of profit margins and not just profits. In recent years especially, that’s a big part of why your new car choices have skewed so heavily toward bigger crossovers, SUVs and trucks.
Getting rid of the gas tax and switching to a mileage tax that factors in vehicle weight would help with this. If it costs you more every year to drive a bigger, heavier car, you’re going to want something smaller.
I like the idea of a size tax.
I also like the idea of extended driver’s license requirements to drive some of these monsters vs a sedan.
California is basically doing tax trials based on total mileage travelled per year, but not size.
My understanding from people I know in the CA Govt. legislature is that they have to tax based on what is known and one could easily have modifications on vehicles that would go unnoticed (truck lift kits, rice burners, hack jobs, etc). Mileage otoh is submitted during tax season already.
Very few, if any, modifications are going to dramatically change a vehicle’s curb weight. Of course, electrics weigh more than similar ICEs, so a better reason to skip a weight based tax is so as to not disincentivize electrics.
Edit: Also, what do you mean “rice burners”? Afaik, rice burner refers to any vehicle of Asian origin whether tuned or not. And trust me, tuning a car is not going to increase the curb weight by more than a few pounds.
Sorry, I got ahead of myself without clarifying. The idea of taxation based on the size of “stock” vehicles or even a stock vehicles estimated mpg was turned down because considerations such as: Vehicle Body Modifications, Vehicle Engine Modifications, 5th Wheels, Trailers, Poorly Tuned or Mal-Maintained Vehicles and many others listed means the end result would be a poor assessment for more than 2% of registered vehicles and thus resulting in not taxing appropriately.
So while they can do it (tax by size or empg) by pulling any data that the DMV or tax filings show, those considerations hamper the idea’s effectiveness in taxation for the California Department of Tax and Fee Administration (CDTFA).
As a result, Road Charge (mileage) was adopted in CA as the future replacement for the existing 7.5% + gas tax. https://caroadcharge.com/
As long as they do it by checking the odometer once a year and not with some kind of ridiculous privacy-destroying GPS-based scheme, I’m all for it.
(There are some dipshits who try to justify the latter by claiming they need to know where you drive to send the revenue to the right jurisdiction. Bullshit! They can just measure traffic volumes on each road segment – which they already do – and allocate proportional to that instead.)
Agreed you don’t need the mileage aspect just weight and VAT. However your insurance company app is likely already pulling GPS shenanigans and if your OnStar or whatever “roadside assistance” GPS box and cellular modem are enabled a lot more than just your location are being shared with anyone willing to pay for it.
Not on me, they aren’t. My newest vehicle is from the mid-2000s and none of them have tracking built in.
On a related note, I can’t own an
EVelectric car because nobody will sell me one that respects my privacy.Edit: I do own several EVs: they’re bicycles, not cars. (They are my and my wife’s “daily drivers,” though.)
I disabled the OnStar box on mine and went over it with a flipper zero. Overkill I know but it was a fun afternoon seeing just how many radios and how much signal generation there is in a modern vehicle.
The only radio now is remote start and key auth.
Sidenote if you have an older car you might want to get an OBD2 lock, they’re 30 bucks and are a pretty handy theft deterrent. Metal ones tend to be better.
My manual transmissions are an even better theft deterrent at this point I think, LOL!
(Also, my two oldest cars predate OBD2.)
I never even considered using my flipper to check for outbound signals. I have been wanting to track down the installed LoJack for a while and make sure it’s properly disabled, that might help.
I’m sure you’ve seen it but this guide got me started
https://docs.flipper.net/sub-ghz/read
The problem with that is that EVs are heavier, meaning that smaller EVs would be taxed at the same level as SUVs or trucks. But it might at least incentivise people to go for smaller ICEs, and switching to mileage tax might be necessary anyway.
But isn’t it the weight that does more damage to the roads that the taxes are intended to pay for?
the weight does damage yes, but the lionshare of road damage is caused by shipping trucks because they are magnitudes heavier than a civilian vehicle while loaded. It’s the reason truck weigh stations exist
…and a weight based tax would put the lion’s share of the tax burden on shipping trucks.
I think we’re in agreement here?
Do you think an electric car that weighs 1000lbs more than similar ICE cars is doing that much more damage to the road? And compare the damage cars, suvs, etc, would do versus box trucks, tractor-trailers, etc. There is no comparison to the damages between the two classes of vehicles. While true, an SUV will do more damage to the road than an econobox hatchback, even combined they don’t equal the damage a fully loaded tractor-trailer will do.
I’m not sure your point here. It sounds argumentative but in fact I think we agree?
I think the damage is proportional to the weight so taxing based on weight makes sense.
Yeah. Car registration pays for road maintenance. EVs are still paying for that.
But that would disproportionately hit poor people. Generally they have to live farther out, where rents are cheaper, and in much of the US public transit is a pile of shit.
Hell, even in places where it isn’t it’s still painfully inconvenient. I live in a fairly transit-friendly city, and it takes my husband 45 minutes to an hour to get to work by transit, or 10-12 minutes by car.
How far is he from work? If your city has the right transit chops, an ebike might actually put both a car and transit to shame. Drives that take an hour by bus or 35 minutes by car take 26 minutes or less in my city, due to godawful traffic. But the bike lanes have no traffic lights and cut straight through massive areas, instead of block by block streetlights.
The problem is there are no easy safe bike paths directly there; he would have to either ride out of his way to one or travel part of the way on narrow fast roads that have a lot of box-truck and semi-truck traffic. Or get on the freeway for a stretch, which is also bad in different ways.
The bike paths that there are, are pretty nice, but they’re more geared towards ‘enjoy a ride along the river’ and less towards ‘get from the inner city out and back again quickly’.
But yes, when he is willing to take those risks, it’s about a half-hour or so to get to work.
I’ve noticed this a lot in industrial areas; no-one seems to think you’d want to ride a bike there, so they don’t bother with infrastructure. Unless it’s in the inner city, but in that case it’s more a thing of happenstance since there are bike paths already surrounding the area so it’s less work to add a few connecting paths.
Yeah, hopefully that is shifting a bit more. When a bike system works, it is really nice. But many cities are just now realizing that they can be more than toys. It took our city to a breaking point before they realized that there was no physical room to keep adding lanes to the highways and roads around the city now that things have been built up. We still have traffic so bad that it can take upwards of an hour to move two blocks, though. That’s starting to change now, finally.
Busting all the out of state registrations would also net a boat load of money.
You realize that electrics are heavier than similar sized and shaped gas vehicles, right? So this would be an incentive to keep buying gas cars.