Featured Federal EV fees

To me, if the average household has 2.28 cars, then the average car (or driver) uses $2,193 of gasoline per year.

At $3.17 per gallon average, that's just under 700 gallons a year. If the federal government takes 18.4¢ per gallon, that's $129 per year in federal taxes. Adding my state's fuel tax here of 40¢ per gallon would be another $280 per year per car in taxes, or around $400 total per car per year in Colorado that EVs don't pay by not paying for fuel.

Again, the federal fuel tax average that they are trying to recuperate is $129 per car per year, at least according to my quick googling and math. I would guess states can figure out how they want to charge for lost fuel tax.

Now if you add in the subsidies on gasoline and diesel they probably should be paying EV drivers.

 

Most all of these “studies “ even ones from typically reputable groups if you look at the dataset are making absolutely no effort to separate commercial/ private vehicles so ride share, taxi, delivery is mixed in there.

Many of these studies literally look at the amount of taxed fuel used nationally and divide (sometimes in unscrupulous ways) other times treating everything as being included in the average fuel per vehicle (semis, cement and delivery are also apart of the average driver population)

Most all average miles estimates look at everything on the road regardless of what it is, even if it has no bearing on a typical but not average privately owned car not used for rideshare/ apps

 

i thought the averages were 25 mpg at 12,000 miles per year?

of course, we all know is bill is a hit piece on progressive policy, and has nothing to do with reality.

 

According to those numbers, federal fuel taxes would be $88 per year per car on average. If we add another $20 to all other cars, then all other cars get charged $108 per year on average.

A hybrid could be charged the same $108 per year if it used 91% less fuel than an average car (about 278 mpg). Or, if you drove enough miles to make up for the extra tax, you could break even. But for the great majority of hybrid drivers, they'd be paying more than the national average. Assuming 40mpg average driving the same 12,000 miles as the rest, such a hybrid would be paying $155 per year, almost $50 more per year than an average non-hybrid.

And EVs would be hit with nearly double the tax than a non-hybrid, just because. Unless you drive some 25,000 miles or more per year, then you'd break even with the tax.

 

6 days short of 6 years. $30 short of $3000 total fuel costs for a Rav4hybrid with 41k miles. $500 a year fuel costs. Wife's Avalon hybrid plushmobile sedan does better.

Those averages for fuel use are including lots of those vanity pickups you see all the time.

 

I spend between $100 and $200 per month in fuel in my Avalon hybrid. Some months even more than that. Then again, I drive a lot more than your average American.

 

Free fusion power at my home for my EVs.

Bob Wilson

 

I'm all for charging by mile if it is feasable. Adding weight is even better. A flat tax per wheel is also acceptable. Another way to deal with EVs without involving the DMV or changing how other car use is taxed is to tax something like a 2 cents per KWh on public charging stations and a one time several hundred dollar tax on the purchase of a L2 home charger. It isn't perfect. People who drive without level 2 or public charging would not be paying any tax to fix the roads, but how many EV miles would those people be driving anyway? Another idea would be to just add a tiny tax (a small fraction of cent per KWh) to everyone's electric bill. Of course this is not ideal because everyone uses electricity, not just EV owners. Preseumably EV owners will use a lot more electricity. My round trip commute uses more electricity than I use to power my appartment for 2 days. However the current 18.4 cents per gallon doesn't appear to be adequate anyway, so gas vehicle drivers likely need to pay more too. EVs not paying for road repairs and improvements might become significant problem once there is mass EV adoption, but currently I think the biggest reason for inadequate funding is that the federal gas tax has stayed 18.4 cents per gallon since the early 90's and has not gone up with inflation. Any solution to the problem that keeps a tax on a gallon of gasoline needs to tie it to inflation or make it a percent tax instead of flat xyz cents tax per gallon. Otherwise we will keep running into the same probem in the future.

Of course this bill is not a legitamite attempt to fix the problem in a fair way. If it was, the tax on EVs and hybrids would be significantly lower and would start at the same time as the flat tax on regular gas vehicles.

 

I spent about a third of what I do now when I had an EV. But then again, the EV wasn't the kind of vehicle I could just go on a 800 mile emergency drive.

 

right now, our ev and hycam cost about the same to operate. at 6,000 miles per year and 50mpg, we pay about $24. in fed gas tax

 

One thing ironically is for certain, as fuel prices dump, the taxes become a larger percentage of the whole. Things are pretty cheap here in the south for fuel



This is through Arkansas and Tennessee. Sure makes driving a 20 - 25 MPG diesel more affordable.

 

My bad. I should have said "significantly less tax" instead of "any tax." Though there is a state tax on electricity consumption in 45 out of 50 states, there is also a state tax on gas in all 50 states.There is no federal tax on electricity consumption. There is federal tax on gas. Both state and federal taxes on gas are usually earmarked for funding transportation infrastructure and maintenance. As you mentioned, state taxes on electricity typically go to the general fund. However, only small percentage of that tax will go to pay for transportation infrastructure maintenance. So likely 80-100% of the tax on gasoline will go toward transportation infrastructure maintenance, while 0-10% of tax on electricity will go towards transportation infrastructure maintenance.

I agree that getting rid of the gas tax and replacing it with a tax on miles driven would be the fairest way to fund transportation infrastructure maintenance. I thought adding weight to the equation would further enhance fairness, but I did not realize that heavy commercial vehicles were already taxed a lot more via a heavy vehicle use tax. So far I am not aware of any DMV or governmental organization tracking annual mileage on all vehicles, so there would need to be some system to do this. The DMV in my state gets mileage data when a car is sold or transferred. For vehicles older than 8 years old they also get mileage data every 2 years during the smog check. My insurance company tracks my mileage, but that is self-reported data. I am not sure how big of a deal it would be to set up the processes to start tracking everyone's miles accurately, but it sounds like a pain to me. Would everyone go in for an annual inspection? Would every vehicle need to get some sort of annual maintenance service that would then have to report to the government? I guess that would force people to take care of their vehicles, but BEVs don’t need oil changes. I guess they should be getting tire rotations.

Doing a tax per KWh for public charging sessions sounds much easier from an implementation standpoint, but ~ 80% of EV charging is done at home. About 66-88% of BEV owners have L2 charger installed at home. Though you could charge 40 miles a day on a L1 charger, I doubt a lot of people driving around 40 miles per day would keep a BEV without ever installing a L2 charger. I realize that taxing public charging sessions and home L2 charger purchases has significant flaws. I was just throwing it out there as another option.

 

True - exception being - those of us scofflaws that are generating all of their PV power for recharging. That leads back to per mile taxation, which needs to be balanced by weight of vehicle.
.

 

true, but collections remain the same

 

I think we have a reasonable idea of knowing. It isn’t that difficult to find what percent of a state’s general fund is spent on transportation. In California it was about 1% for 2023-2024.If a state tax on electricity goes to the state general fund and 1% of that general fund is used to maintain transportation infrastructure, then effectively 1% of that electricity tax goes to pay for transportation infrastructure. It doesn't really matter which dollars from the general fund went where.

I agree. They definitely don't in a lot of cases, but I think my original statement that 80-100% of fuel taxes go to transportation infrastructure is still correct in most cases. All that article says is that some states, a little less than half, divert 1% or more of the state's gas tax away from roads and in many of those states the diverted money is for other transportation infrastructure.

I agree and I pretty much said that in my first post. The reason the federal budget for roads exceeds what the fuel tax collects is because the fuel tax hasn't increased with inflation since the early 1990's. EVs are not even close to the main problem for infrastructure maintenance yet or in the near future, as they represent less than 2% of total vehicles on the road. Raising the gas tax substantially and tying it to inflation would fix the current problem way more effectively. However, that would be a tax increase on the majority of the US population, especially Trump’s base. Would it be more fair if EVs also paid a tax that is specifically earmarked for transportation? Yes, but we unevenly tax all sorts of decisions to influence behavior. I don’t think there is anything inherently wrong with that. It will only be a problem if/when there is mass EV adoption, which we are nowhere close to. Even if I agreed with the concept, 200 dollars for an EV is way too high and charging for hybrids is just dumb. They already pay gas tax. Is the government going to start charging annual fees for all technologies that improve fuel economy? Of course not. Maybe this is just punishment for purchasing electrified vehicles or maybe it is retaliation against the Biden's big support of EVs. Either way it is petty, vindictive, and unfair.

What will happen is they will buy gas vehicles and pay the gas tax, which will increase the road fund (not meaningfully as EVs are not the main problem yet, just a nice scape goat). Anything that increases the cost of EVs will probably reduce their sales and increase sales of ICE vehicles. Eliminating the gas tax and doing a tax per mile will also make ICE vehicles look a little more economical than they are now and will make EVs look less economical than they are now. There is a reason why sales of large gas guzzlers increase when gas prices are low and fuel efficient vehicle sales increase when gas prices are high. Is it the outcome I want? No. Is it something that I think needs to be done now? No. I personally think we should be encouraging EV adoption at this moment. I was just throwing out ideas of how one could eventually solve the problem of inadequately funding roads in a fair way when there are a lot more EVs on the road. Maybe by that time the government will have all the mileage data it needs to do a tax on miles driven for everyone.

 

A big thumbs up on this

 

Not all general funds are the same, in my state electric taxes overwhelmingly go to the municipality where they are collected.

county spending in Wisconsin does have a much larger portion that goes to infrastructure maintenance due to
1. The smaller budget
2. Our states mandates that force county and local to own specific roads and infrastructure