Going back to the start:
This is nothing to do with road use/congestion or pollution.
Tax is simply the Government trying to raise mo as easily as possible.
- It’s why road tax was created and has always gone into general funds.
- It’s why road tax was changed after everyone got low tax cheap vehicles and now clean ones pay more than dirtier ones.
- It’s why after the protests in the early 2000s, the Government stopped arbitrarily raising the fuel tax in the way it had previously.
- It is no different from when windows were taxed because they could walk round the (tiny) towns, stand on your doorstep, count them and demand payment.
- It’s why we pay 20% “Value Added” tax on stuff that was made in another country, shipped here and driven to the store with no “value” being added in this country at all.
- It’s why we pay 10s of £1000s when we want to move home.
- It’s why the Government takes some of our saved wealth when we die.
The problem is electric vehicle are not dependent upon an easily applied universal tax at a few discrete points because people can charge them from their homes and the money the Govt makes from energy costs is a fraction of what it makes off fuel tax. This neatly illustrates how far fuel tax has become divorced from the actual real world costs of that energy.
In effect, the Government has been caught with its hands in the “energy cost of motoring” till.
(This is something a lot of people will make very obvious once the majority of us can charge from home vs cost of fuel)
As societies develop, they notice the existence of more complex and interesting problems, and propose more novel solutions to them. The foundations of the tax system we have now for vehicles was set decades ago, back when people didn't realise there could be big problems from mass private vehicle usage. That's not because people back then were dumb, or malicious. People were doing the best they could at the time, responding to the problems society had noticed by that point. No, with hindsight, we can see that some of their ideas weren't very good.
The rate of change in society is increasing all the time, and the next big thing we're going to see is mass-scale adoption of electric vehicles. As you say, this is going to drive a coach and horses through the existing system. We need to come up with a better system, but when we do so, we have to pay attention to the problems that we've noticed. Many of these problems will not go away just because the vehicle is electric and possibly even powered by a wind farm or solar panel. If we do not address these problems now, then we're going to have to scrabble around finding a solution to them very soon. The crisis that would unfold from a bad tax response to EVs would unfold in a matter of years, not a lifetime from now. We're better off having a solid discussion and thinking to the very end of the problem and addressing it there, in a way where there's no fundamental changes ever required in future as new technologies become available and society changes to accommodate them.
The answers are simple.
- energy (electric) prices that jump if you use them a lot - ie charging a car daily is going to really increase your electricity consumption. I have lightbulbs and a tv off mine at the moment - 15k miles a year is going to be rather noticeable!
- Increase annual lump sum payment for owning a car / greater purchase taxes / stamp duty style tax on any vehicle purchase incl 2nd hand.
- Tax on battery servivcing / replacement / disposal as that is mileage linked.
Unfortunately, as we have explored in this thread, these answers are not sufficient. They would create and persist more problems than they would resolve.
You cannot tax electricity like that, because we are about to shift to a world where fossil fuels are no longer getting piped or delivered to homes as an efficient way of space and water heating. The reason we have millions of tiny little gas burners inside kitchens and utility rooms across the country rather than what should be vastly more efficient power stations creating electricity from that energy is that there is a practical limit to the amount of mechanical work we can derive from a heat power source. The electrical generation from a coal, gas or even nuclear power plant is based on that mechanical energy. In heat plants, huge amounts of heat is totally wasted because it's too cold to power a turbine but it's too far from the people who need it. This is why co-generation is so incredibly efficient and buildings like The Shard are actually powered by natural gas. You can extract electrical power as normal but then use the wasted heat to warm (and even cool) the building and the water within. The difficulty getting that heat from centralised power plants into homes is large enough that we deem it better just to burn the fossil fuels in the house and not bother trying to extract electricity from it, and just using all of it as heat. This is why the electrical revolution seemed to go backwards over the last 60 years, with pure electric space & water heating replaced by gas boilers in homes.
This world is now slipping away. Electricity generation is moving away from the world of heat generation, and towards mechanical (wind, water turbines) and quantum electrical (photovoltaic) sources. With that, there is no meaningful waste heat at point of production. As a result, you may as well do pure electrical space and water heating in your home. Even if it means going around retrofitting three-phase supplies in homes to power instant water heaters it's still more efficient than having a gas or oil boiler. If everyone is now going to be using electricity for heating, you can't trivially tax large electricity use, because then you're taxing people heating their homes! That electrical energy can be used from anything from charging electric vehicles to powering appliances to heating water and there's no practical way for the government to tell what was used for what. The split taxation system for diesel (red vs white) is only enforceable because of the dye that gets added and the authority of the government to do dip-stick tests in vehicles that are only eligible to use white diesel.
That is, unless you start creating byzantine tracking systems to check how much you've charged your car separately from your normal electricity supply. But then you get into a whole world of pain because fundamentally the technology used to power an electric car is no different, other than scale, from the technology used for all sorts of other consumer devices in your life. Base the tax system on this and people will come up with ways to charge up vehicles without the government being able to track that charging. And, unlike red diesel or a movement tracking scheme, there's basically no way for the government to tell whether someone has done it or not. The complexity in overriding the vehicle charging system will be overcome if the economic incentive is there, just as it would be if you made taxation dependent on it!
Having a static charge for owning a vehicle also makes precisely zero sense. For one, it means that people who need a car for occasional use are stuck with a high charge even though they do very little consumption damage. It also creates weird incentives about leasing cars. If the cost is fixed per vehicle, then all you'd end up with is a mass rollout of rental-by-the-hour services where that fixed cost gets divided up by lots of users while their own actual usage isn't properly taxed. If you do own a vehicle, it then means you have little economic incentive not to use it at any given moment. If the marginal cost of motoring is basically zero, then no one who owns a car is ever going to be persuaded to use public transport.
And a mileage scheme means people who live in rural areas will suffer dramatically. You cannot come up with a single mileage charge which works for the entire country. Either it's too high for rural areas, or it's too low for people in cities who are driving around for no good reason at all. And as explained earlier in the thread, it also means you create really extremely perverse incentives for people to avoid slightly circuitous bypass roads in favour of driving through traditional town centres!
Or this byzantine system of pricing every mile of road, legally requiring people to declare their whereabouts at all times and the infinite arguments that creates. Good luck, but I dont think Sir Humphrey would even have a description for how “courageous” that would be - looked at what happened to fuel tax escalator, motorway pricing and ID cards - of which this is all 3.
I found this article very interesting today:
https://www.vox.com/2020/4/10/21215...ing-economy-recession-depression-unemployment
As you may have noticed, we're in a bit of a crisis at the moment. Unfortunately, it appears that until there is a vaccine or suitable treatment for Covid-19, the only viable ways for countries to return to any sort of normality will be the imposition of a technological-health surveillance state. Your individual areas of freedom are fundamentally irrelevant in a world where you, individually, could trigger another pandemic.
