they want you trapped in the fossil fuel death spiral
this post was submitted on 20 May 2026
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Fuel taxes pay for roads. If you don't buy fuel you don't help pay for roads to drive your EV on.
Fuel taxes pay for roads.
If only other types of taxes could be used to pay for roads... But alas, only gas taxes can be used for that. Entirely different monetary system, that. Roads need gas money and regular money just won't do.
Other types of taxes are exactly what this article is about. A flat tax for EV owners is their proposed solution to the problem. Sure, other options exist, but people are commenting like this is an insane idea and it's pretty vanilla.
Oregon has a pay-per-mile system that would be more fair, IMO. Not sure if they still have it but at one point, they let you choose between having a tracker or just self-reporting your mileage. Makes sense if you use the road less, you should pay less and vice-versa.
Flat tax just spreads the estimated additional wear and cost around to everyone, like going out to dinner with a group and splitting the bill evenly vs just paying for what you ordered. I’d rather just pay for what I ordered.
More fair would be to pay for road wear and tear. Bigger cars do more damage to roads, and semis do exponentially more. Drop the gas tax and charge per mile scaled to the weight of your half loaded vehicle.
I own an EV and already pay an extra road tax for having an EV to my state, on top of more for tires, more for insurance, more for repairs, and more for public fast charging thanks to the government’s failure to build up charging infrastructure at a decent pace. Why should I pay another tax to the federal government?
The "if things weren't insane right now" answer is that state taxes don't directly go to support the federal highway system, that's funded through things like gas tax as well. The current real answer is "fuck you and your tamed lightning car, liberal"
Kinda figured it was something like that, in both cases lol
Fuel tax only pays 25% of the cost of roads.
Are there no vehicle taxes in the US?
It’s the US we get taxed on everything, it just isn’t always obvious.
Sam Graves, Federal Congress Republican of Missouri, Wants You To Pay $130 A Year Just To Drive An Electric Car
FTFY
But is $130 actually fair?
Well, a flat fee doesn't take into account vehicle weight or annual mileage, which the gas tax more-or-less does. And the road maintenance cost is a function of those two things. A flat fee would penalize drivers of infrequently-driven small vehicles.
But...I suppose that gathering that data would also add some privacy concerns and costs, like the government needing to record how many miles your vehicle has traveled in a year.
EDIT: The really obnoxious thing is that everyone else is grabbing movement data on vehicles to make money off. Automakers via integrated cell radios. ALPR network operators. I assume that charging station operators do too
fast DC connections like NACS transmit the vehicle's VIN, and I'd be very surprised if charging companies aren't monetizing that data.
You could tax tires, it avoids all the tracking while still distributing road maintenance costs based off actual use of the roads.
That's an interesting thought.
thinks
Tax revenue would be less-frequent, and there might be potential to create a misincentive to encourage people to unsafely drive on threadbare tires longer than they otherwise would. But I could see that being done.
Include tire checks with thread depth minimums in the annual or semiannual registration renewal.
Personally more of a fan of a pay per mile system but this is actually a really cool sounding alternative.
Or ... we could just not tax electric vehicles, and call that a subsidy to encourage the more environmentally friendly option.
If, at some future point, electric vehicle adoption becomes so widespread that it becomes difficult to provide road maintenance because gas taxes aren't being paid anymore, then you can find a different funding source for it. Maybe just fund it out of the ordinary general tax fund. Or even go really crazy and raise taxes on billionaires by two hundredths of a percent.
It is always far easier to accept a new change if it is combined with a group of larger changes, than to try and implement a new change on it's own.
If this type of tax had been implemented right from the start when modern EVs came on the market it would simply be a small part of the calculation of owning an EV.
Waiting until now, and you get this kind of response, waiting further will not improve the public opinion.
Damage to the road scales with axle load using a fourth power. Yes a fourth power. So an average truck does roughly 3000x more damage to road surfaces than an average EV.
Yet, weather influences account for the majority of road wear, so the weight of cars really does not matter at all.
I'm aware that vehicle weight is the mechanism to tax cars in many countries, but within groups this makes little sense if it is to compensate for road wear. Whether its fair to exempt EVs from road taxes is a different story, and depends on other externalities and the type of travel behaviour a government wants to promote.
A flat fee would penalize drivers of infrequently-driven small vehicles.
This is one of the reasons that causes me to pause whenever I've considered purchasing one. My state also has a yearly fee.
I work from home and don't drive to justify these fees so I just keep my long ago paid off vehicle well maintained for a fraction of the cost of a car payment.
Sounds good… who do I pay $130/year to to get to drive an EV?
Trump :(