electric cars, hybrids and politics?

We have a hybrid...a Ford CMax 2016.
We have been 'penalized' $100 each year for 5 years tacked on to our tag renewal which is $27.  The past two years it was $50 each year.
The states argument is that it's because we don't buy as much gas thus don't pay enough road tax 🙄

We like the car and suppose it will last as long as we need a car...hopefully another 10 years or so.  My eyesight is too far gone for driving but so far Steve's is good.
We drive 20- 60 miles once a week and  a 200 mile round trip every couple months.

I've heard of rewards for driving electric, rebates or something, but punishment seems underhanded...do other  states do this?

We live in the previously blue, currently very red state of Arkansas and expect this to get worse even though the state has lithium mining in the south and one would expect some support for electric cars and hybrids?

I mean...the public roadways do have to be maintained. And historically, our entire system was built around funding that with a tax on gasoline. I don't drive a hybrid or electric car yet, so I didn't realize that was a thing until you wrote about it, but it seems like an OK idea to me.

Then, maybe a more fair way might be to tax/ penalize by number of miles driven?
We are lightweights as far as road use.

It's a state by state thing...many do not charge extra for driving an electric or hybrid.

Yeah, I see what you're saying. Accounting for mileage seems like the way to go, but I'm not sure how those data would be collected. In AR, do you have to take the car for annual safety/emissions inspection? Maybe the recorded mileage at the time of inspection could play into the annual fees.

Christopher Weeks wrote:Yeah, I see what you're saying. Accounting for mileage seems like the way to go, but I'm not sure how those data would be collected. In AR, do you have to take the car for annual safety/emissions inspection? Maybe the recorded mileage at the time of inspection could play into the annual fees.

I'm not sure why but inspections were dropped here years ago.
We had so many old clunkers on their last legs that those inspections were a comedy routine but we usually managed to pass.

We finally have a car that is reliable and somewhat less of a footprint than our old gas guzzlers and affordable to drive.
AND we are on a fixed income so every bit of it matters.

Steve thinks they dropped inspections here because of cost...might be before Clinton was governor.

Does anyone know the political climate for electric cars with the new administration?
I thought I heard that much of Biden's work promoting them has been undone already.

I think the new administration's party is generally hostile to anything that can be perceived as "green". Trump mentioned in his inauguration speech yesterday that he would end the electric vehicle mandate and we could buy whatever cars we wanted. I was wondering what that referred to and then today I noticed this piece from Politifact (https://www.politifact.com/article/2025/jan/20/fact-checking-president-donald-trumps-inauguration/)

Trump misled when he said, "With my actions today, we will end the Green New Deal, and we will revoke the electric vehicle mandate."

No "Green New Deal" is in effect. Sen. Edward Markey, D-Mass., and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., introduced a 2019 resolution that offered a broad vision for responding to climate change, but it never became law. After Biden became president, Congress passed legislation, including the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and the Inflation Reduction Act, that advanced some climate policy goals. Trump cannot undo laws by executive order.

As of the evening of Jan. 20, we had not yet seen what Trump’s executive actions will bring. In 2024, Biden’s administration, building on a target set in its first year, issued a rule that 56% of all new passenger cars and light trucks sold in the U.S. to be electric or hybrids by 2032.

I don't know if or how that will affect people who own such cars. I'd guess minimally.

thank you!
for the information and the very useful link.

Our car insurance is Provincially mandated. When we renew it, we are to take a photo with a date stamp to show them. We get a discount on our insurance if we are below a certain number of kilometers since our last renewal.

If the genuine goal of the surcharge on electric cars is for maintenance, there are multiple sides to the problem:
1. Yes, the gas is taxed to do the same thing, so it's not an "extra tax" it's just being taxed a different way.
2. The roads need to be maintained whether you drive on them daily or monthly. Much of the maintenance is weather related, so more hours of traffic doesn't directly relate to the costs - but it is a factor.
3. In my province, the reality is that a pile of the money from gas taxes doesn't go to road maintenance. A specific amount goes to subsidizing public transportation, and I believe a bunch goes into "general revenue". Public services require someone to pay for them. There tends to be a lot of whining if property taxes go up, so hiding them in gas taxes is one way to do it. So if the electric tax seems a bit high to you, you need to look into where that revenue is really going.

Using odometer readings to make these sort of taxes as fair as possible is easy to do. Even if an individual doesn't have a camera, all it takes is a friend with a cell phone to help them out once a year. If you look into it and still feel it's particularly unfair to people who drive minimally, I would propose a mileage based system and see if they show interest. It does make sense to me that people who drive more, should pay more for roads.

Hi Judith,

We have "domiciled" in TX, OH, NC and MS and traveled all over. At one time we had a 2010 TDI (diesel) VW Jetta and got 43+ MPG, in the city. When we researched residency implications in the states listed, and if $$$ savings was the goal, owning an electric or hybrid did not make sense for us in those states. At the time, we considered trading to something else but we could not do better than what the car we had provided.

It is interesting that you get penalized on top of possibly getting less MPG than some other modern vehicles with gas or diesel engines that would not be penalized.

Most of our acquaintances that own electric or hybrid vehicles do so for ideological/philosophical reasons and overall cost of ownership is not considered.

It does not seem that these nuances are very well understood by most states, unfortunately. I am not sure how it should be handled to be fair to everyone except what was already mentioned on taxing per mileage. Then again, nowadays we have a 1 ton dually diesel chevy. Would it be fair for us to pay the same amount for a mileage based system? Could be if they keep fuel tax because we'd be buying more fuel. So I guess it would have to have both, fuel and mileage based taxes to be fair.

I don't know anyone that could run on that platform and get elected. It may be best for some to find a conventionally fueled vehicle that gets good mileage to get the best cost savings in our current times, if cost savings is the goal.  

thank you everyone!

I guess I just needed to vent some frustration.

We write  a letter to the state every year questioning the fairness of this and now I see more clearly suggestions we can offer rather than just a complaint in the wind.

The car was both a philosophical/ethical position and a convenience.  
We did realize there were other gas only cars with better milage.

I'll admit to some nervousness/paranoia since the 20th and it's too cold for me to play outside 💜

There is a genuine practical question around this that all governments will need to get to grips with. The move towards vehicles being electric is happening and will continue to happen without government mandate because they are the most cost effective option for the vast majority of cases. That might take longer in the US as I believe that your fuel prices tend to be lower on the whole than say Europe, but it will come.

Most governments have used a combination of fuel taxes and vehicle taxes to pay the upkeep of the roads, and generally electric vehicles apply as much wear-and-tear to the road network as petrol vehicles. So how will roads be maintained as the proportion of electric vehicles continues to increase?

Paying for road through taxing the fuel used makes sense - fuel use is in proportion to the miles driven, and thus to the wear your vehicle does to the road. It also incentivises good practices like selecting more fuel efficient vehicles and driving more economically. With electric vehicles it is harder to make that link between consumption of fuel and taxation. In the most extreme case you may be charging your car entirely from your own solar cells for example, and so not participate in a fueling system that can be taxed... but still making use of the roads.

So when looking at a question like this, I would push it back to the person and say "What do you think is a fair way for you to contribute to the road system you are making use of?"

At that point we can talk practicalities - like should it be through a vehicle tax? based on mileage (what about if my vehicle is used on my own land most of the time, and a small % on the national roads?)? Should every car have a permanent GPS tracker that monitors milage on the road system and sends you a monthly tax bill, effectively turning every road into a pay-per-use toll road (this one has surprising advantages - you could eg display the toll rate in real time, and it could vary based on time of day to encourage people to avoid periods of high traffic or certain sections of the road system). There is no clean answer. Any proposal will have downsides and make someone unhappy. But a solution is needed.

Well said Michael, thanks!

I like the idea of a tax linked to miles driven and to also take into consideration the weight of the vehicle.

Which roads used, (interstate, state, gravel, farm) might be more difficult to determine.

The thing that bugs me is I suspect 18 wheelers pay less tax per mile than the rest of us.  I'm damn near sure they pay less per ton of rolling weight.  So if it's really about road maintenance and damage, charge the same tax to commercial diesel and they can spread that cost to the consumers.

Building on what Mike wrote, I've read that the fairly dramatic subsidies the trucking industry receives accounts for a lot of freight being delivered by truck that would be cheaper and less polluting if it were delivered long-haul by train and then trucked only the last short while. So fixing the taxes like he's suggesting might fix several problems at once.

There is an excellent book that covers the thorny issues related to finding fair taxation schemes.

A Fine Mess

It is a surprisingly enjoyable read, covers how we ended up with the crazy taxation systems we currently have, and what we might do about them. I can't remember if road tax specifically was covered, but it is comparable to many other issues in there.

It's been a long time since I have read it, but one of the principles that comes up repeatedly is that taxation should be a low rate, spread over a wide base.

Every time an exemption is made - no matter how "fair" it appears (eg electric vehicles don't pay fuel tax) - the end result is that the tax burden of spread over few people, so the rates have to go up. As go up more people are driven to lobby for exemptions so the base is narrowed further and the rates rise... eventually the whole system collapses as the rates become so high on so few people as to be unsustainable.

The book looks primarily at the US, which has a particularly messy taxation system, but the lessons learned are universal.

Good point about the subsidies. They can really obscure these things.

Christopher Weeks wrote:Building on what Mike wrote, I've read that the fairly dramatic subsidies the trucking industry receives accounts for a lot of freight being delivered by truck that would be cheaper and less polluting if it were delivered long-haul by train and then trucked only the last short while. So fixing the taxes like he's suggesting might fix several problems at once.

and more freight delivered by train would then (possibly) improve rail travel all around ( meaning upgrade the tracks) since amtrak uses many of those same freight train rails. The last I rode the train the tracks badly needed some maintenance.  

Christopher Weeks wrote:Building on what Mike wrote, I've read that the fairly dramatic subsidies the trucking industry receives accounts for a lot of freight being delivered by truck that would be cheaper and less polluting if it were delivered long-haul by train and then trucked only the last short while. So fixing the taxes like he's suggesting might fix several problems at once.

I think this problem is even more skewed than what Mike points out. When I talked with a road engineer a while back complaining how I shouldn't have to pay as much for my 400 lb motorcycle as people pay to license their ton+ cars, he said cars don't create any significant wear on road surfaces either. Apart from weathering, pretty much all road damage is caused by the trucking industry. The increase in damage isn't linear by weight, it is logarithmic. He described tests done with sensors that show the asphalt on a highway actually "flows" with a wave in front of the wheels of an 18 wheeler. It is similar with buses, if you've ever noticed in cities where they have blacktop on a bus route, they will often replace the area where a bus stop is with a pad of concrete instead as the weight of the the bus stopping will eventually deform the blacktop there before the rest of the street deteriorates.

The way I figure this works out is to be a sort of "progressive" tax for the economy. Regular car owners (more well-to-do) pay a disproportionate amount toward road maintenance, while the trucking industry can reduce shipping costs and put cheaper goods into stores for people (the 'masses') to buy. It increases profit for the trucking/oil industries, makes things easier for politicians that use the 'bread and circuses' model, and sadly degenerates the environment for everyone else and all future generations compared to a more responsibly taxed system.

Bussing for public transportation is more complex. They do more damage but are intended to have other benefits by keeping a greater number of cars off of the road. A possible problem is in most places they are subsidized and there is an expectation to provide service even where the demand is not high enough to replace enough cars, to provide good political optics.