this post was submitted on 30 Apr 2025
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Electric Vehicles
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Remove fuel taxes. Apply taxes to tires. Done and done.
You'd incentive people to make tires that lasted longer and that would be horrible.
But also
I do love it when Republicans ride into office on a wave of people screaming "ARGH! I HATE TAXES!" and then spend the first four months in office finding an exciting new way to raise people's taxes.
More than anything, I'm looking forward to all those Cybertruck owners getting the "Fell For It Again" award branded onto their foreheads.
Adjust taxes based on tread wear rating.
Or just tax by miles driven and vehicle curb weight instead of doing stupid proxy workarounds.
There's a whole lot more administrative overhead that would need to go into collecting miles driven data after it's been driven, and such a system would be far easier to cheat.
Tax on tires based on treadwear and load ratings would be dead simple to implement.
Road user charges aren't uncommon. You prepay for mileage and if your odometer doesn't match the tag, you are fined.
If you do it based on company estimates for wear at the time the car is sold, hello expensive tires! You are collecting 30k miles worth of taxes at once. The tax would be even higher on long wear tires! On top of that different states have wildly different amounts of tax they add to gas which will incentivize buying tires from out of state. I assume similar differences exist in the EU as a comparison. This tax would also be part of buying a car, since they come with tires.
If a tire gets ruined, you already paid the tax and get to pay it again to continue driving. Hello potholes and construction nails!
If you try to spread it out based on wear over time, that would be far harder to calculate than just checking the odometer.
Okay, the expensive tires thing is a problem. I did a little math.
Let's say you get 50K miles out of a set of tires. At 25MPG, with an existing fuel tax of $0.50/gal, switching that to a tax on tires would amount to $250 per tire for a set of four to equal out. You'd ultimately be paying the same amount, but attaching it to the tire would make that all come up front. And then, yeah, you'd have people driving out of state for tires (if neighboring states didn't do the same thing), as well as driving in to the state for the cheap gas.
Bah.
Note that most EVs get nowhere near that. The faster acceleration, higher torque, and heavier weight chew through tires.
So a flat tax on tires would results in EV owners paying more even though they don't damage the road significantly more than petrol vehicles.
Doubt
Most road damage comes from large vehicles like trucks and busses.
So I'll swap some newer tires on there timed with this. Or keep a set of barely used ones. Grab some cheap ones from a car yard. They'd need a lot of strict rules around this.
Don't insurance and dmv already collect miles driven
Treadwear isn't a scientific measurement though.
Wait what? Aren’t CO2 emissions caused by burning fossil fuels? Why wouldn’t you want to tax those?
This isn't about CO2. I think the idea is that a lot of our funding for roads is based around the taxes for gasoline and diesel. Since EVe don't use either, they are damaging the roads at the same (or more due to their weight) but not providing the tax revenue for the maintenance work needed.
Moving to tires would apply the taxation to both vehicles types. I think it's a bit short sighted and tires are used for more than road vehicles; but at the same time so is gasoline (like yard equipment.)
Eh...people already drive on tires well after they're too bald to be safe anymore. Taxing tires is just a great way to make sure that people replace them even less often.
Maybe increase vehicle registration fees? Charge connection fees to connect your driveway to a public street? Charge businesses per-space parking lot taxes? I dunno. This seems like a tricky problem to solve.
Why not apply to mileage instead? More miles on the roads means you use the infrastructure more
Tire wear is proportional to vehicle mileage and weight. A tire tax would effectively do the same thing while being easier to implement.
Incentivizes not replacing tires which is bad for safety and all.
Is it easier to implement? Maybe, but not really.
An alternative and would just be an annual inspection. Some states already require this, many just emissions. Just have it as a blanket annual safety inspection requirement for all vehicles, including emissions for the necessary vehicles.
I don’t know why you’re being down voted, but yes the mileage every year is recorded and taxed. In my state if you drive less than 10000 miles a year you get a discount on your inspection.
It's because some people despise the idea of inspections.
Because ensuring the basic safety of a 2-3 ton hunk of metal flying down the road at speeds up to 80mph is apparently government overreach. Or because it's an inconvenience to have to take it in once a year. Or whatever other bullshit reason they try to justify in their heads that basic safety inspections are a waste of time and resources. You know, shitty people.
It is until tire manufacturers get an incentive to sell decreased wear tires, likely at the expense of other features. Along with people putting off tire replacement even longer, this would just be asking for a significant decrease in road safety.
In Oklahoma they used to tax vehicles according to sale value. A lightweight, fiberglass Corvette could be an easy $600 a year while my friend's 2-ton dump truck had antique plates at $20 a year. Guess which one tore up the roads.
I think they changed that system long ago, and at the time Texas taxed according to vehicle weight.
Antique and Classic plates usually have pretty restrictive use policies associated with them. Assuming you don't ignore them and risk a ticket every time you drive outside those uses.
For Oklahoma for instance:
Given the antique registered vehicle is supposed to only be used on public roads in very limited scenarios, the small cost is appropriate, regardless of the specific vehicle.
"Primarily" does a lot of heavy lifting there. Basically, it doesn't outlaw using it in other manners so it wouldn't be easily enforceable by a traffic cop. It would only really be brought forward as fraud if a prosecutor could prove you used it "primarily" for other reasons.
And thats beyond saying that driving it, on its own, is not an exhibition purpose.
Tires have limited mileage, so effectively the same result and you dont the gov invading your privacy.
The privacy of what? An odometer reading?
Sure... except thats very unlikely to be implmented for the millions of vehicles when modern cars already have all the means to remotely report information. Pilot programs already opted to use dongles for remote reporting.
Tires are also a consumable that, if used to the point of failure, become a hazard to the driver and anything around them. Adding the tax to the tires would encourage those with lesser means to use them to the point of being dangerous.
So add vehicle inspections to the list. And taxes can be prorated if the tire failed before being fully consumed.
L. O. L.
So rather than just take the mileage of the vehicle at registration/renewal, we'll add more red tape to the process and make everything cost more so we can use a silly proxy to get the amount of use of the vehicle.
That's the American way I'm used to.
There are several states already that require safety inspections.
Hell emissions tests are required for ICE vehicles in nearly every state, and guess what they do when those roll through for emissions testing? They record the mileage.
There's no additional red tape here, it's the same red tape that was there before it was an EV that didn't need emissions testing.
I wish they took my mileage into account for my emissions testing. If it's under 500 miles between the two year emissions testing period, I'd appreciate them being more lenient.
You think the government gonna hire thousands of people to read millions of odemeters a year when they can just contract third parties to install a dongle to track it remotely, and we're just trusting they wont suck down all kinds of other information...
And we dont have to speculate, its already been implemented in pilot programs in some states. And was planned in Biden's instrastructure bill.
https://atr.org/bipartisan-infrastructure-bill-paves-way-miles-traveled-tax/
The bill lays out the various “vehicle-miles-traveled-collection tools” that would be used by the federal government to track drivers. These tools include third-party onboard diagnostic devices (GPS tracking devices), smart phone apps, data from automakers and data obtained by car insurance companies.
They've tried mandating vehicle inspections in my state several times. It never goes very far.
Driving is a privilege. Odometers aren't personal secrets.
That's how you end up with people driving on racing slicks and wire...