If EV wins and they can no longer collect all that juicy tax revenue from gas - how are they going to afford to maintain infrastructure? They collect far more than 20bn in revenue from fuel taxes.
They will just move the tax to the Tesla Superchargers and the other electric charging stations. Alternatively they could tax it at the DMV level, like they already do to some extent. i.e. instead of a $100 registration fee every year, it will be a $500 registration fee.
I'm going to guess it will be a mix of both, but the govt(s) will be slow to do either, until they realize, too late, that they didn't meet their income goals on fuel taxes last year and suddenly have a shortfall in the budget :)
Applying a tax at EV charge points wouldn't work well because most charging happens at home. It's difficult to distinguish electricity used to charge an EV from that used elsewhere in the home.
I suspect most states/countries will eventually adopt a combination of higher annual registration fees and mileage-based road user charges.
Ah good point, make it based on usage.. your mileage counter says you went 100k miles this year, here is your 500k registration bill!
As for the charging @ home vs a supercharger(and the like) I agree with you, but the government is not known for always being wise or letting facts get in the way of something they want to do :) They understand a "Gas tax", so including EV chargers as part of the gas tax is easy to understand and easy to approve.
Check odometer readings as a requirement of renewing the vehicle's registration. Assess a fee as a function of vehicle weight per axle and distance traveled. Sure, at the state level there will be some missed edge cases (what if I am registered in Washington but do most of my driving in Idaho?), but it should be close enough. It's basically fair and way less invasive/expensive than GPS-based tracking for road use.
>what if I am registered in Washington but do most of my driving in Idaho?
Also it's likely to be evened out by someone who's registered in Idaho, but is driving in Washington. And in any case, the taxes can be adjusted to account for a fraction of cases like that.
This is also more fair than fuel taxes because low-efficiency vehicles aren't necessarily doing more road damage.
