Netherlands testing car use meters that tax your environmental impact as you drive

Oops – misread that first word in the title as neanderthals…

Big brother is coming to a place near you…and it is not the television version variety.

Just what people need, another overly complicated tax that’s impossible to understand and ripe for abuse by the government to scam more money from the hard working people who actually earn it.

Amy Moritz Ridenour says:
August 13, 2011 at 10:08 pm
Don’t know about the Dutch, but Americans would revolt at the idea of the government recording every place we drive and when.
They haven’t revolted at the idea yet.
http://www.greencarreports.com/news/1042274_are-we-ready-for-a-new-kind-of-gas-tax
http://gsmgpstracking.com/2010/05/government-wants-to-install-gps-in-every-car-to-tax-you-by-the-miles-you-drive-is-that-a-great-idea-or-what/
I foresee booming sales in GPS jammers.

I think cattle prods will become common in the every man’s garage for these little invasions. 3 seconds of 100KV should do the trick.

The proposals to meter car use have come up already in regressive, Opps! progressive states like Oregon.
http://www.infrastructurist.com/2011/01/31/is-a-vehicle-mileage-tax-coming-to-a-state-near-you/
Pilot programs for a “vehicle miles traveled” tax have sprung up in Austin, Texas, Oregon, and Nevada.

At last, the purpose for which tinfoil hats were invented.

This is what happens when Eurocrats need to legislate/control/subjugate/TAX all their citizens. The thin edge of the EU wedge uses compliant countries like the Netherlands for testing new concepts and the sooner the EU and its Megabureaucrats collapse the better [wishful thinking on my part I know].

We already tax on the basis of use. Its called the gas tax. Oh, yeah it doesn’t tax those electric and high milage car scofflaws.

Isn’t this what a tax on fuel already accomplishes ? So why the tracking ?

And what does this accomplish that a plain old fuel tax doesn’t?

How is this better than a fuel tax? Bigger vehicle = more fuel = more tax. Longer drive = more fuel = more tax. Walking = no tax, except sales tax on your shoes, and then there’s always barefoot.

Johnathan Castle,
Neanderthals! Yes I did that too. Had to do a tripple take before I got it.

Are these proxies for petrol consumed?

Amy Moritz Ridenour
“Don’t know about the Dutch, but Americans would revolt at the idea of the government recording every place we drive and when.”
They do too. As far as know, this plan is of the table. No majority in Dutch Parliament, too complex, very expensive systemm and many ways to manipulate then system. Dutch government even considered to introduce legislation punishing people harshly if they unintentionally forgot to turn the system on (the toll system was only to be used on highways, not on normal roads). Many Dutch people oppose against this system.

and what are they going to do when the driver ripe the thing off his car and throw’s it out the window

AMY if your car has ONSTAR or something simular they already can and if you have a cell phone since 2007 they can it is built into every cell device since 2007

Meant “of the government micromanaging our lives”

One more reason why I love my bike.

The socialist governments of Europe, led by the EU, have been turning their citizens and subjects into criminals for the past 30 years. Americans have had only 3 years of this sh1t. Clean your stables next November or be Europeanised.

Groan. The UK government has been toying with this highly unpopular idea for a number of years. And now the Dutch, a once admired and sane nation, have created a physical manifestation of this adsurdity.
Damn their authoritarian eyes!

GPS based? Easy to defeat; block the GPS signals. A simple metal shield will work nicely, and the thing will never know it’s left the garage. (try using a GPS indoors; they often can’t get a signal).
or, cut the power lead. Or fry the damn thing with microwaves from a microwave oven (simply rig the door sensor so it can run while open, and aim), or a ton of other ways. A hammer would be my first choice, or just feed the thing a high voltage charge and fry it, etc.
They day they mandate this, is the day I become an enthusiastic criminal. Enough is enough, and this is way to goddamn far.

The tax on petrol (gasolene) is aleady a tax on how much you drive. This is about control.

High fuel prices in the UK are having the “desired effect”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/2011/jul/08/tax-revenue-drops-as-drivers-cut-back-on-petrol
“The government has lost almost £650m in tax revenue in the first 12 weeks of this year thanks to a drop in the amount of petrol and diesel being used by British motorists compared with the same period three years ago, according to the AA.”
When the country has a massive hole in its finances our government seems to be doing everything it can to make things worse.
Appart from the direct lose of revenue high high fuel prices also increase industries transport costs keeping inflation high. This together with ever increasing gas and electricity prices does not bode well for the British economy.

The first enterprising person to sell jammers over the internet will be the next billionaire.

I think the reason for hare-brained schemes like this one is that they’re already taxing fuel to the maximum they safely can.

Arizona CJ says:
GPS based? Easy to defeat; block the GPS signals. A simple metal shield will work nicely, and the thing will never know it’s left the garage. (try using a GPS indoors; they often can’t get a signal).
or, cut the power lead. Or fry the damn thing with microwaves from a microwave oven (simply rig the door sensor so it can run while open, and aim), or a ton of other ways. A hammer would be my first choice, or just feed the thing a high voltage charge and fry it, etc.
CAR says – you have no GPS signal – you have 30 seconds to get reception or the car will stop.
Wonder what happens if you are stuck in a tunnel in a traffic jam ???

I remember this being suggested a couple of years ago in the UK. SF writer Charlie Stross was full of scorn in his blog, and gave several reasons why it wasn’t practical–including the likelihoodcertainty that within weeks of such a system being set up, you’d be able to download dodgy software for a mobile phone to generate an alternate GPS signal…

@ Don K
Last I checked LPG had duty on it, though here in Oz it’s a lot lower. There’s no reason for it to stay lots lower and every reason to expect tax to shift from one fuel to another, and in fact I think the rate on LPG did go up last month as a result of last year’s budget. This is to be expected and has happened before and will happen again. When I was a kid (in Britain) diesel was quite a bit cheaper than petrol, but by the time I was actually driving a diesel powered car rates of duty had caught up and diesel was actually more expensive than plain old unleaded – still was when I left the UK several years ago. The same will happen to LPG, and then it’ll be CNG or whatever the next fuel is. Electricity? Same again. I’ve always had to pay either VAT or GST, which amount to the same thing, on my electricity bill, so if I had an electric car my bill would be higher the more I drove it. Not only that but it would be higher still the more I loaded the car with people or cargo. Sitting in traffic wouldn’t cost in the same way that any kind of internal combustion engine does (unless switched off, of course) but then it doesn’t emit anything or use up any more of whatever went to producing the electricity to begin with. And of course there’s still the cost of the driver’s time, so traffic congestion is and always will be its own disincentive.
Whatever is powering my car is by the by – if my use of it rises roughly in proportion to the amount I drive then I’m going to be paying more for driving more and paying more for a heavier or less efficient vehicle, just as I am now.
“What’s YOUR solution`to equitably funding highway maintenance in the 2030s and beyond?”
The thing is that fuel duty and other transport taxes, at least in the UK and Oz, don’t go into funding maintenance and construction, and I don’t think they have for years. It might be ring fenced where you are but I’m used to it all going into the same pot as almost all other tax and road building and maintenance coming out of the same pot. I’m pretty sure the same applies in the Netherlands and everywhere else in the EU (assuming the EU hasn’t imploded thanks to the various debt problems of some of its members by the time this comment is approved 😉 ) and I’d bet that that would still be the case if distance based charging ever happens. I’m not suggesting it’s equitable, but I am saying that arguably there is less need for equitable funding of roads in the future when there isn’t now (UK motoring taxes are several times greater than expenditure, making them at least partly Pigovian) and hasn’t been for a while.

The role of the Green Socialist in the Netherlands, but also in the rest of Europe is quite big. Nonetheless there was quite an opposition against this way of taxing and the plans were skipped.
The real problem is that the budget of most European countries are handled by greenies who socialize to much with the money they can spend.
Currently we pay for petrol € 1,60 per litre, which is about USD 2,25 or USD 8,50 per US gallon or USD 10,20 per Imperial gallon. Eighty percent of this price is tax. As a result of this I consider drivers of a Chrysler 300C, Mercedes S Class, Audi A8, Jaguar XJ, Cadillac Escalade or BMW 7 series as socialist.
(Now you can wonder what our ministers drive – I give you a hint, it isn’t a Toyota Camry 2.2)

algorithm that tracks the following things:
The car’s environmental impact -OK
The distances driven, -OK
The route, -my fascist detector is beeping like crazy
The time it is driven -OK

I wonder how it would cope with a 5 minute session with a demagnetizer?

Mailman says:
It’s even more curious as to why this is popping up in The Netherlands when you consider the Dutch are major users of bikes.
That’s exactly why this is popping up! There are a lot of people who do NOT own a car, and they want others to stop using their car. Not suprisingly, they also wanted the tax money to be spent on public transport.
It’s the same as when the Party for the Animals (pvdd) suggested higher taxes on meat: they are mostly vegetarians themselves.
Basically it’s “Let’s tax the things I do not use to pay for the things I do use”.

As the government mandates cars that get twice as many miles per gallon and more electric cars the fuel consumed will go down and so will the taxes collected. They’re just staying on top of it. A highway system doesn’t just happen. The pavement is still made of oil that isn’t getting cheaper. Lots of complaints here but can someone provide an alternative?

This the result of liberal angst resulting from being caught between two loves, the love to tax versus the love of their appearance in the mirror of “saving the planet” from CAGW. Somewhere along the way, as liberals clamored to increase highway fuel taxes as a means for people to pay indulgence for adding the evil Mr. CO2, one of them was apparently just smart enough to take notice that that effort was flawed because the more they would try to increase the fuel tax, the more people would try to avoid paying it, (as though that was something new…).

“Oh noes! We’ll get LESS tax revenue as people become more efficient like we’ve been telling them and if everyone begins using electric vehicles we’ll get no highway taxes at all because we have no means to place highway taxes on electricity, so ….. WE NEED AN INFRASTRUCTURE TO KNOW WHERE THOSE DAMN ELECTRONS ARE GOING SO THAT WE CAN TAX THEM. We’ll call it “Smart Grid” and say it’s for improving efficiency so that nobody will suspect that its ultimate purpose is to be able to TAX people on how they use electricity. In the meantime we’ll just have install a meter in the cars to tell us how far they went.

As I sit here wondering how much my lawnmower paid in highway taxes I think maybe the only fair way to tax vehicle road use is to tax the only the thing that touches the road – the tires. We already have a federal excise tax on tires so just raise it, (put chips in them or something if you’re worried about tax cheats, I don’t care). Then we can just eliminate the fuel taxes altogether and abandon such Orwellian ‘ideas’ like metering cars, houses and people.

If you carry a cell phone around with you the government already knows where you go and when. It’s easy enough to do by triangulation with cell towers which has been going on for as long as there have been cell phones or if you’re like many people these days your phone has a built-in GPS and you leave it enabled so all your favorite location-based services work properly. To escape the precision surveillance you have to disable the GPS but note it can be turned on remotely. To escape the rough location surveillance (down to a city block) the phone must be turned off, preferably by removing the battery to prevent remote activation.

This system – pay-sa-you-drive – was almost introduced in 2010. No one talked aboul lowering taxes on the gasoline. The road tax was to be abolished, and we were told we would not come out worse. The system was based not on GPS, but on kind of radio transmitters mounted on highways.
Whole infrastructure was ready to implement. People objected, based mostly on privacy issues, and somehow it was put to a limbo.
The minimum cost of driving was about 3Ecents/km, to be increased depending on th time and the kind of the road. Of course, there was planned a big administration to collect data/compute charges/distribute invoices.
But, the idea keeps on poping-up. I presume too much money was invested in th system development. The GPS is a new twist; I agree, that we would have to pay for the use of Galileo (as we would pay for the use of roads). After testing in NL this sytem would be introduced surely in other EU enviromentally savvy countries.
To some extent it resembles the CFL regulations – to ban incadescent lamps to allow Phillips to get profits from its CFL technology.
Some time ago I heard a discussion on a radio that the system should be made mandatory in every car to improve the safety: when a car gets off the road (accident) then the system would automatically notify the rescue services. So every car must have it, this was the argument. The journalist asked the promoteur how many such accidents (at night) occur in NL; the answer was that hundred? maybe…. But anyway, the guy could came up with such an interesting new regulation 🙂
So, it is about money for manufacturers of the sysem componets and for tax offices, plus institutions that would get access to money by collecting/servicing the information. One of the biggest manufacturer of GPS road-advisory systems is from NL…
It is quite easy to convince Netherlanders to environmentally-friendly behaviour. They are less willing to pay taxes, but this will go oby salami-principle (slice by slice our money will be taken).
The biggest chance to oppose is the privacy (it was LARGE issue in the former system incarnation).

The Dutch love to be over regulated.
In Holland, if you wan to play golf you must pay serious coin to attend and graduate from a government licensed golf school.
Go figure.

Most governments need more money than they take in so they will always be on the hunt for tax schemes that are richer than what they have in place. Fairer has nothing to do with it.
The only way citizens can put a stop to this is to face doing for ourselves what the government has been doing for us. Do we really need the Federal government involved in education? Do we even need the state we live in involved? How about leaving it up to local citizens in counties for example to pay taxes for the schooling they want available? We can go down the list of nanny programs and decide. And yes, that will mean taking care of grandma yourself. That will mean teaching your severely handicapped children necessary life skills and leaving the schools to teach academics if your child has the capacity to learn it. It means taking charge of our own public forests and parks. Fund what we want, and manage resources the way we want to. Do we want our roads to be in good condition? Fine, set up toll booths or local tax levies. Or maybe we want the Federal government to create and maintain infrastructure. But we have to decide for each of these things. If we do a bad job deciding and funding what we want, we have only ourselves to blame. If we do a good job, people will want to move to our communities and help us fund what we want.
The way it is now, we have been lulled into thinking that the government will fund our everyday needs right down to the toilet paper we use. How did we get this far down that path?

The Netherlands are so huge anyway… sarc/off

I see a lot of logic in this thread; without having read everything here. However what you have all missed in the typical socialist’s inability to understand basic maths. For instance ask your local tame socialist a question regarding paying a % of earnings as income tax; and why it is necessary to have different bands so that the more you earn; the high % you pay. The conversation will go something like this :
(self) Some one paying 10% tax and earning £1000 pays more tax than some one earning £100 pounds ?
(socialist) but they pay the same % thats not fair; the rich should pay more
(self) but they do pay more; 10% of 1000 is 100; 10% of 100 is only 10
(socialist interrupting) see they both pay the same 10% they should be made to pay more
Yes I have had this conversation on several occasions with different people over the years (in different countries too!).
You have the same problem with fuel duties; the average socialist just can not understand how a fuel duty of 80% means some one who uses more fuel pays more tax – because they all pay 80%.
In the UK some 40% of school leavers do NOT understand percentages; which means they can not understand one of the many evils promulgated by socialist; they honestly believe that if every one is paying the same % tax then the rich pay less than the poor.
So while almost everyone who reads WUWT will understand the innate fairness of a fuel tax; you will have a massive uphill struggle trying to convince many people just why that is so

Just tax the fuel. (oops, they already do that, don’t they?)
You have to remember that the low-energy (environemtally ‘green’) flourescent bulb scam was brought to you by the same people.

The only way to prevent government from abusing your rights is to prevent it from having the capability to do so.
If this system involves the use of GPS or other form of satellite-based navigation, it will enable government to DESTROY the privacy of private travel by personal automobile. Now at least you can turn off your cell phone if you don’t want to leave a trail of bread crumbs in some database.

Sitting behind this is the EU proposal to ‘overhaul the outdated rules’ on energy taxation in Europe. For ‘overhaul’ read ‘massively increase and spread the scope of’. There is no pretence at making this revenue neutral, every type of fuel sees an increase. See http://ec.europa.eu/taxation_customs/taxation/excise_duties/energy_products/legislation/index_en.htm and http://ec.europa.eu/taxation_customs/resources/documents/taxation/minima_explained_en.pdf . There is no reference in here to fairness, progressiveness, or what the taxes are to be used for.

G. Karst says:
August 14, 2011 at 8:44 am
I would like the answer to one thing, today:
What is the maximum total tax rate that has been successfully imposed on the general population, WITHOUT causing riots and civilian revolt.
/end quote
In the UK under Harold Wilson (1960s) Income Tax went to 95% – yes really 95%, Admittedly not on ALL the income – just the Super tax band (no I don’t know how much it was; but it was the top step of many…)
In India in the 70’s anyone earning more then the resident/PM (can’t remember which) got hit for 100% tax on the ‘excess’. In fact for expatriate Indians the tax could go to 110%.. A number of UK shipping companies were in trouble with the ILO (International Labour Organisation – part of the UN) for not paying their (Indian) Crews enough; when the ILO were told it was to avoid 110% tax the ILO responded that the tax rate was not their problem; the underpayment was ! I seem to remember the problem was only resolved when India dropped her tax rates.

James of the West says:
August 13, 2011 at 10:20 pm
Fuel tax is a much more simple
A fuel tax falls apart as soon as you have any significant market penetration of electric or natural gas vehicles. Then there are issues as to the expense of building and maintaining different kinds of roads. Why should I pay a fuel tax that pays for a bridge that I never use?
If I look at my state’s DOT budget large sums of money are going into high cost projects that I will never drive on.
In Seattle they are building a $3 billion tunnel. I have no need to drive in Seattle…never mind a need to drive through a $3 billion dollar tunnel. Why should I being paying to build and maintain that tunnel via my fuel taxes?
Universal electronic tolling…bring it on. I’m not bothered having to contribute my fair share to maintain the roads that I drive on.

Fred from Canuckistan says:
August 14, 2011 at 7:00 am
The Dutch love to be over regulated.
In Holland, if you wan to play golf you must pay serious coin to attend and graduate from a government licensed golf school.
Go figure.
A good thing then that I live in the Netherlands 🙂
But indeed to play golf on most golfcourses you need a handicapcard from the NGF (Nederlandse Golf Federatie = Dutch Golfing Federation) or one of its foreign sister-organisations. But that has nothing to do with the governement.

Most tax relating to vehicles in Europe is fuel tax, hence UK prices of £1.40 x 1.60 x 3.8 = $8.50 per US gallon, similar across the EU. A rather easier method of taxing drivers on ‘environmental impact’.

Tax fairness for road use and maintenance? ALL vehicles (bicycles included) using the highway system should be paying road use taxes and licensing fees. In fairness, bicycles and ‘alternate fuel’ vehicles should be paying higher licensing and use fees, as their owners are unfairly evading the fuel taxes that sustain the road systems! There is no free ride, in a ‘fair’ world, right?
If you insist on ‘sharing the road’, shut your pie hole and share the fully burdened costs of building and maintaining the transportation system that you use to access your work site and transport all of your food, clothing, building materials, home heating fuels, garbage collection, mail, etc. to and from your door and local markets. Let’s be fair…… really fair, for a change.

Pamela Gray says (August 14, 2011 at 7:47 am): “The way it is now, we have been lulled into thinking that the government will fund our everyday needs right down to the toilet paper we use. How did we get this far down that path?”
Too many of us like to think we can get “somebody else” to pay for the things we want for ourselves. In reality, the “free lunch” costs us more (directly or indirectly) than one we buy ourselves, but too many of us aren’t smart enough to see that. Supposedly about half of all Americans pay no income tax, so we may be at a tipping point.

Bike tax, you know we had that in the Netherlands from 1923 until 1941, all bikes had to have a copper plate mounted to the bikeframe with a year on it stating that the tax for that bike that year was paid.
If you where unemployed than you did not pay bike-tax, but you where required to have this tax-plate so you where issued a plate with a big hole in it so that everyone else could see that you where living on the dole!
During 1941 the German occupation forces decided that it would be a populair measure to abolish this tax, and yes we where glad to get rid of it. Later the Germans took our bikes and in general everything else to help their war-efforts, from late 1944 with the southern part of our country liberated the Dutch people in the still occupied western parts got their first taste of when a modern society is being cut off from food and energy supplies.
±20,000 people died that winter of starvation and many more suffered from prolonged malnutrition and a brutally cold winter.

Smokey,
I advocate the same annual licensing costs for bicycles and alternate fuel vehicles as is paid for personal automobiles. To that I would add a tax equivalent to the local, state, and federal fuels taxes paid by a motorist averaging 7000 miles per year at 30 mpg. The federal subsidies paid to encourage purchase of alternate fuel vehicles (up to $7,000 US for ‘hybrid’ and electric vehicles) , should be halted immediately.
Why such seemingly high taxes for the pedal pushers and alternate fuel folks? The installation and maintenance costs of highways, with or without ‘bike lanes’, are largely driven by environmental effects and maximum cyclic loading effects from heavily laden trucks, and not the secondary wear effects from private autos or bicycles. The heavily loaded trucks are transporting all of the goods and services that the citizens (auto owners, bicyclists, pious prius owners, et.al.) produce or use in their daily participation in commerce. The highway maintenance and repair costs from environmental damages (freeze/thaw induced potholes, corrosion of bridge structures and concrete reinforcing bars, unanticipated compressive buckling from thermal expansion effects at max temperature, etc.) are ‘fixed’ costs that should be paid by ALL who use or benefit from the goods and services transported on the highways.
The owners of petroleum fueled cars and trucks are paying a disproportionately high percentage of the highway costs, through their embedded fuel taxes and licensing fees, as well as federal subsidies to purchasers of alternate fuel vehicles. It’s way past time for the alternate fuels and pedal pushing freeloaders to ‘pay their fair share’.
Share the road? Share the costs!

G. Karst says:
August 14, 2011 at 10:58 am
ok – understand your question better now – however neither tax I mentioned was in any way windfall taxes, nor tax evasion penalty taxes, nor any one time contingency tax.
They were part of the ‘normal’ income tax systems. The UK Super tax ran for several years and cost the UK massively in business people (the UK Brain Drain primarily to the States) and of course resulted in many businesses being set up ‘off shore’.
The Scandinavians are up at over 50% – and yes; they get a lot back in the way of health and social care

All unelected, grotesque, insensitive, forever growing, government bureacracies will ultimately demand that all citizen pay checks be forwarded directly to their accounts and they in turn will perhaps return a pittance for us to possibly survive.

kramer;
And that’s what they want to do, change our driving habits so we drive less so that there is more fossil fuels for the developing world to develop with.>>>
Are you serious? Saracasm on?
Because if all it took was to have fossil fuel in order to become developed, then exactly what has gone wrong in Iran, Saudi Arabia, Chad, Lybia, Venezuala, Egypt, Syria…
And how did countries with pretty much zippo for oil become part of the developed world? Like Britain, Germany, Japan, Taiwan, Singapore, South Korea…

G. Karst;
There is no magic number. Its like the story of the boiled frog. Drop a frog into pan of hot water, and he’ll instantly jump out. Put a frog into a pan of cool water and he’ll be just fine. Turn up the heat slowly, and he’ll die without even trying to get out.
Raise taxes from 25% to 55%, and you will have revolts in the streets. Raise taxes from 25% by 0.25% per year for 120 years….and you will be where we are right now. No revolt.

G. Karst says:
August 14, 2011 at 7:29 pm
peter_dtm
MarkG
davidmhoffer
Your points are all valid, but I don’t think I am communicating effectively.
I am referring to all taxes paid, income tax, sales tax, road tax, custom and excise taxes, licenses, parking meters, ALL TAXES. Can the average wage earner’s after tax earnings equal zero?
As a example, I will attempt a clumsy answer (obviously if I knew the answer, I wouldn’t have asked the question)
A people can be taxed to a maximum value that results in a zero disposable income, for the average wage earner. From that point onward, spontaneous rioting in diverse locales commence. For the average wage-holder this corresponds to a 70% (WAG) of total income paid out in all taxes.
Obviously, my above answer is not correct, so what is the actual economic theory? GK
*******************************************************************************************
As davidmhoffer says at 09.57pm there is no magic number, but I think that the frog analogy is incorrect (if amusingly true).
Surely the point at which the revolution starts is when the general population does not have sufficient money to subsist (buy food and shelter for themselves and family). So it depends on general incomes and food prices.
Think Egypt, Morocco, Algeria, Libya, Syria et al.

@David L
Then a black box that measures distance driven and a yearly MOT test would be enough.

I think they need to take this one step farther. Not only do we want to discourage driving, but also to encourage carpooling. In this effort I think it is obvious that we need to install RF tracking in the citizens themselves, so that the automobile GPS system can record and transmit who is in the vehicle as well as where the vehicle goes. They can just use the off-the shelf RF tracking currently used for pets. Think of the law enforcement benefits!! Oh wow!!

stumpy says:
August 15, 2011 at 2:42 pm
“Why not just charge tax on fuel, then the more wasteful people pay more tax, like a user pays scheme – oh hang on, we already do that!!!! And it doesn’t seem to change peoples attitudes to cars!”
Don’t forget the mandated E10 and E15. E10 throws an additional 1.5 cents per gallon and E15 an additional 2.3 cents per gallon just from the lower energy content when compared to regular gasoline. This is based on an average US State tax rate of 20.9 cpg and the Federal tax of 18.4 cpg.
Of course they want you to use E15, it puts more money in their pockets in the long run.
*feel free to check my math, it’s been a long day of driving…. to repair State owned equipment.