This will kill EV adoption, just to put it into perspective this is the equivalent of an average ICE car (38.6MPG) having 25.5p added per litre of fuel, in a single budget.
The even more ridiculous thing is plug in hybrids are 1.5p per mile, so people with 80+ miles of range in their Golfs etc. will pay half price, even though they are needlessly dragging around an internal combustion engine for 99% of their journeys.
The tax included in petrol is 53p (plus vat) so twice as much as the number you quoted. What you mean is that EV owners will need to start paying their share for using the roads.
So take the equivalent value off fuel duty and make the 3p per mile charge for all cars. Yes it’s shuffling,but it sends a much clearer message that this change is for all road users.
That would be a much more sensible way to go about it and would also fix the weird plug-in hybrid only paying half price thing. Although it would be a bit weird that less efficient cars would save more when you juggle things around but that’s a one off thing really.
It kinda makes sense though. You contribute to the roads based on milage (and possible vehicle weight) and you pay for polluting depending on how much fuel you use.
One of the big issues with government spending is that they don’t earmark what money is for what, so RR has just seen a deficit in total tax revenue because fuel duty revenue is down and said “EV vehicles are escaping it. They need to pay”. If they had the mental model of “This pays for that” then it would be obvious what would make a fair system.
That I could agree with but you probably need to nearly double the amount.
Don’t EV users pay tax on the electricity too?
Yes but only 5%
In order to introduce this they needed to apply it to both ICE and EVs equally, to keep the transition to EVs going.
This just encourages people to choose ICE and Hybrid over EVs. If you’re paying public charging prices at a very average 3m/kWh you’re paying 28p per mile. Compared with 13.5p per mile for the average petrol car.
This is making any transition to EVs uncompetitive.
You mean to drop the fuel duty by 50%, and introduce EV charge in the same time, yes? That would be an equal treatment.
Sadly no, I don’t think the pay per mile model is the right way to fund our roads if we are still going to charge a large amount of road tax to everyone on top.
But if they want to encourage EV adoption and had no better ideas, they should have introduced a blanket 1p per mile for everyone.
People who bought an electric car on a tight budget and drive 12k a year have been hit with an extra £560 in costs per year in the last 8 months.
This is how it works at the moment. Huge amount of tax is included in the fuel price. This is now being extended to EV which according to your estimate will be paying roughly half of what other road users are paying. This is more than fair - especially if you take into account EV are much heavier and are putting disproportionate pressure on the roads.
Depends on what you are trying to achieve, we should be moving away from burning fuel, and this takes us a step back.
Also the heavier EV argument is a bit weak, they are not much heavier, and wear and tear when the roads that have to cope with 30ton lorries?
The road infrastructure needs to be maintained or we don’t get any deliveries, and the shops have no stock, it’s not just drivers that need the roads.
It was you talking about fairness.
These 30t lorries are paying significantly more tax than normal vehicles, nevermind EVs. Would you perhaps prefer vehicles to be taxed according to their weight?
It is vehicles using the roads and vehicle owners/keepers (not “drivers”) paying the taxes - and rightly so.
No, it wasn’t, I didn’t mention fairness because that is not my point at all, my focus is moving away from ICE vehicles.
As long as all safety system weight is removed from the calculation then maybe! We don’t want companies sacrificing safety for weight reduction.
Also significant changes should only apply to new vehicles, so the rules don’t change retrospectively after people have already made significant financial decisions based on government policy.
That you?:
Normal cars are taxed per your own calculations twice as much as EVs. That is far away from “equal” treatment but at least EVs owners now will START contributing.
My MG4 weighs ~1.6 tonnes, taking a VW Golf as a roughly comparable ICE hatchback at ~1.4 tonnes it’s really not that big an increase. Compare that to a Land Rover Sport at 2.5 tonnes for example, the EV weight thing is really overblown IMO.
You may have more cherries to pick somewhere.