DaveinOlyWA said:
i would rather see taxes on larger vehicles based on weight and mileage. if you want to drive a high mileage vehicle and its not for business purposes, you should pay a premium
I agree, that would be the most fair and it's relevant. Separate the road tax from gasoline and instead tie it to weight per axle combined with distance traveled. That takes care of nearly every kind of vehicle, including NEVs, CNG, Fuel Cells (Hydrogen), EVs, Solar vehicles, whatever else you can think of.
However, FAIR and PRACTICAL don't always go hand in hand. Setting up and maintaining that system would be expensive, especially at the start. It's definitely possible. You could even have it be a self-reported system, and verify that mileage (and make up the difference if you lied) every X years or when the vehicle is sold. You have to report mileage for every sale, that's a perfect time to check up on what has been reported compared to actual mileage. (oh, gee, 6 months ago you reported that your odometer reading was 65k, but now you're selling it at 210,000.... Guess you need to pony up some road taxes....) But any of those options are significantly more costly to maintain than putting a tax on gas, and/or a flat fee at registration.
Frankly, the more I think about it, I'm really not that upset about the $100 tax on EVs. At least for now. As long as they're doing no sales tax and the significant rebate, I'm still WAY ahead. The amount that the taxpayers are helping my up-front costs (including the EVSE), I'm willing to pay back a little more than my share in road use taxes. Once those other breaks go away, though, something should change.
The aspect that does bother me is the fact that if Nissan chose to put a little tiny gas generator in the Leaf, even if it took days to charge the battery, it could then be called a hybrid and be except from this like the Volt is. I think they need to at least re-write this law to have it set based on battery capacity or EV range or something.
CNG is going to become a big thing, it already is for heavy equipment (garbage trucks, buses). Other technologies will come out as well. They'll need a better way to handle this in the future, I just don't think they know exactly how to deal with it right now. This is the cheap and easy thing for them to do in the meantime so that they can wait and see what the real world data suggests.
$100 per year? No biggie. I'm saving more than that PER MONTH just in the difference between electricity and gasoline. Is it fair? Of course not. But I could go on for days about the stuff that isn't fair. Quite frankly, I think more things are unfair in my favor than not, so I really shouldn't complain, should I?