US transportation bill would add a $130 annual fee for EV drivers(arstechnica.com) |
US transportation bill would add a $130 annual fee for EV drivers(arstechnica.com) |
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.
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.
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.
If yes, RWD vs AWD is your answer, combined with wider rear tires.
Maybe they think that most people will just charge at home instead of charging stations if they pay significantly more at charging stations
If this fee makes sense, then they should also remove any existing taxes for roads and assess the fee to every car.
I do think that this bill is clearly structured to disincentivize EV purchases at a time when transitioning to EVs is an extremely good ideas for both the public and the climate.
There are a ton of other ways to go about this that would be less punitive: A one-time fee at purchase. A tax on public charging. A tax on charger purchase for home use, or on electricity at homes which have chargers installed.
I think the goal here is to get people not to buy EVs.
Also - and maybe this is a shortcoming of the reporting in the article, not the legislation - I have questions. How is this going to be collected? Is the IRS going to ask if you own an EV and then assess a tax? Are states going to do it? Who's going to pay for the process of figuring out who owns which EVs and how much to tax them? Is there a grandfather period for existing EVs or are we taxing all EVs going forward? Are we taxing them retroactively, too?
(By the way, the "Albert Gore" quoted in the article, despite their similar names and political interests, appears to be no relation to the former Vice President of the United States. That's a fun coincidence.)
Off-topic: Metal doesn’t do well in that region,
you expect better from road-materials?
When in PA/NY and others near the Lakes, I regularly see newer rusted cars,
rusted-out newer satellite dishes…
PennDOT is possibly one of the best in the country.
Your expectations for the physical shape of the roads and their materials are absurd,
given the chronic, sustained WEEKS of humidity, precipitation/snow in the region.
Ah, I see the game plan. Republicans pass this. Democrats then stiff red states in some particular way, maybe by taxing the ethanol content of gasoline.
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?
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.)
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.
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.
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...
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.
I could understand shying away from admitting you drive a Smart car - this is just neat.
That should scale.
More serious, on topic reply:
The combination heat and humidity during Summer is the differentiating factor. Worse than London etc.
You can rebuild the road twice a year, still gonna crack.
>You can rebuild the road twice a year, still gonna crack.
Rebuild or patch potholes? It's been over 2 decades since I've been to Philly and Pittsburg, not sure how things are now. I lived in the tri-state area for 15 years until '05. Never saw anything approaching rebuilding, just mickey mouse patching (Brooklyn, NJ, Manhattan).
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.
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.
Off-road driving.
additionally, most people have probably paid to replace tires worn due to imbalance or other issues. how would that be accounted for?
What kind of tire shops should I look for? Smaller ones or specialty ones?