By Tsvetana Paraskova – May 13, 2019, 12:30 PM CDT 
A bill at the Illinois legislature proposes to raise the annual registration fee for electric vehicles (EV) from US$17.50 to US$1,000 and to more than double the gas tax from 19 cents to 44 cents per gallon, under a plan to fund infrastructure advanced by Democrat State Senator Martin Sandoval.
According to the bill, introduced at the Illinois General Assembly, owners of fully electric vehicles “shall register the vehicle for a fee of $1,000 for a one-year registration period,” under the proposal that strikes out the current “In no event may the registration fee for electric vehicles exceed $18 per registration year.”
The bill also proposes to increase significantly the gas tax in the state, as well as the license fees.
The proponent of the bill, Martin Sandoval, argues that this is a plan to raise funding for much needed infrastructure improvements in the state, while EV owners and gasoline car owners alike are unhappy with the proposed legislation, for different reasons.
“We haven’t updated our gas tax since 1990. We haven’t had a capital bill in over 10 years. It’s time to modernize our transportation funding formula to make it sustainable and consistent,” says Sandoval, adding that “Our transportation system has been underfunded for far too long. We’ve been kicking this can down the road for decades and it’s time for us to finally step up and find a solution.”
According to Rivian, an EV developer which is considered to be a potential future rival to Tesla and which owns a factory in Illinois, the proposal for such high EV fees would discourage EV technology.
HT/Sara
Just another reason to leave that doomed state. This is what bankrupt states do when they are desperate. California is next. Find a Red State with no income tax. Move!
That’s my plan. Leaving CA. A 4th generation Californian leaving the tent city shithole this State has become.
As long as you leave the failed leftist policies you voted for behind, no problem. Don’t bring your issues to deplorable country. It won’t go over well.
Thank you.
Look at what has happened to Colorado. Even the lefties in Boulder are now complaining.
Gums sends…
SMC May 16, 2019 at 1:32 pm
Where do you think all of the Californians came from? In 1960 the population was about 16 million today 39 million. Many Californians left the state because the outsiders took it over.
So when they come into your state after have wrecked Cali they are just coming back home.
michael:-)
This is why I don’t own a car right now*. You couldn’t come up with enough money to bribe me to buy an EV anyway, and making some smug, self-righteous twit who wants one pay that high an annual license plate fee is just fine with me.
*I rent a car on an as-needed basis. Much less expensive than owning, paying insurance fees that rise every year, gasping at gas prices at the pump every week, and I get to test drive everything available and decide what I do and don’t like IF I ever decide to buy a car again.
Thanks for posting this, Charles (the Moderator).
Except Florida, don’t move here. We’ve already got enough liberal imports – enough to last us a century or better. Go mess up someone else’s state.
Roads are bad many places, not just Illinois.
The major cause of road damage is overweight trucks. The interstates were designed when semi’s mostly had 3 axles and a weight limit of around 50,000 lbs. and an axle weight of around 15,000lbs. After the interstates were built the weight limit was upped to 80,000lbs(16,000/axle).
Doesn’t seem like much, but much testing showed that as axle weight went up the damage increased exponentially so that the damage doubled for adding each 1,000lb/axle.
Of course, once the highway is damaged it gets worse much faster than an intact roadway.
The damage from vehicles under 8000 lb. is miniscule but takes many years.
Given the ease at which a truck can be overloaded and used on short trips that don’t include weigh stations, the likelihood of getting caught seems to be pretty small.
I recently drove on a highway in Pennsylvania(the roads are pretty bad) that had been completely rebuilt about 20 years ago. The first 20 miles, where it was built up and there were numerous warehouses for loading semis the road was pretty crappy. Get past that and it was silky smooth(asphalt over pavement).
Draw your own conclusions.
Well EV’s use the roads and bridges. And the roads and bridges need to be maintained which traditionally has been paid for through gasoline/fuel taxes. Since EV’s don’t use/pay those taxes some other method for the EV’s to pay their fair share of the cost of the infrastructure they use is needed.
And as (if) EV’s become a larger part of the vehicles on the road more states (and the federal government) will find ways to make the EV owners pay.
A fuel tax is roughly proportional to the amount the vehicle uses the roads. An annual $1,000 fee does not.
Agree.
If Illinois does make their state gas tax $0.44, that plus the federal tax of $0.185 makes the total gas tax per gallon $0.62.5… One would have to drive around 48,000 miles per year at 30 miles per gallon in an ICE vehicle to pay that much… Depending on age, sex, and state, the average miles driven per year is more like 10,000 to 20,000. A fair registration fee falls into the $200 to $400 range, by my estimate, if the intent is to capture the state and federal gasoline taxes not paid at the pump.
Don’t forget that ICE cars have to pay registration each year as well.
ICE registration in Il is about $100.
ICE registration going up too.
That’s just the state tax. In Chicago you also pay a city, county and regional tax so another 50 cents per gallon
I hate to inform you that the Danish gas tax amounts to $0.65…per LITER!
At $0.44 a gallon, my own share of the gas tax would come out to around $500, if I lived in Illinois. Plus I’d still need to pay my own licensing fee, which they said is going up for gas cars as well.
The only real alternative I see to a flame fee for electric vehicles would be one based on milage. You’d probably have to take the car in each year to get it verified.
~¿~
I know for a fact I typed ‘flat fee’.
;p
Yes, but I like “flame fee” a LOT!!!
Yes…fantastic autocorrect
I’m not all that sure that it is important to have “equity” between ICE and electric. If they’re looking to be progressives, it’s the wealthier virtue signalers driving electric around town. And I doubt most will put more than 4,000 miles per year on them.
You mean those fuel tax monies authorized for road & infrastructure which is ‘diverted’ to increased funding for welfare recipients, illegals, and to over paid govt. employees & their fat pensions.
The logical answer would be to make registration $1000 per year for all cars, and take away the gas tax. But the climateers will howl if they try that, so the only reasonably fair option is the one Illinois is proposing.
‘..make registration $1000 per year for all cars,..’ That would keep the riff raft off the streets. Then only the very wealthy freedom to drive.
Its the norm in many countries. It doesnt keep the riff raff of the street, they just drive unregistered, which is a problem if registration includes personal injury insurance as it does in some places.
I just did some quick math. Last year, I drove about 12,000 miles. My convertible gets about 23.2 MPG on average, highway and city. That puts me at about 517 US gallons of gas that I used in 2018. I live in North Carolina, so my state ($0.362) and federal gas tax ($0.184) together is $0.546 per gallon. So, doing the math, 517 x 0.55 = $284.35. Now obviously these are not exact numbers but rounded out numbers. Now pretend I was in Pennsylvania, the highest current gas tax. The current gas tax there is $0.576. So they pay $0.76 per gallon in tax. So in Pennsylvania, I would pay 517 x 0.76 = $392.92 in tax.
But here is the point: an electric car ain’t traveling 12,000 miles per year. In my low MPG convertible, I would have to drive about 30,500 miles a year to pay $1000 in gas tax in Pennsylvania. More miles than that in any other state. 30,500 miles is like driving all of I-40, which is 2555 miles, back and forth 12 times. It is like traveling around the equator 1 1/4 times. It is fair to make electric cars pay more for the roads, but it needs to be proportional to what they would actually use. A $1000 fee for electric cars is about 5 times too much. Nobody is driving a passenger vehicle for 30,000+ miles per year.
Yeah but… it’s Illinois and they are in 90+ day arrears on many accounts payable to state contractors. They are desperate for OPM. And this is in a booming US economy. The cliff with be sudden and steep if a down turn in the US economy comes for states like Illinois, Connecticut, California that are right now only getting by because the economy is up and the rich are “paying their fair share” (as in the majority of taxes from capital gains and dividends).
So if I were a Democrat and the public unions controlled me (redundant, as they control all Illinois Democrats), then I to would be calling to soak those able able to afford the “luxury” of a $50,000-$100,000 EV toy. Because come an economic downturn the public employees will get the first to get the brunt of municipal and state layoffs as tax revenues plummet.
Sorta makes sense, since I doubt anyone in the lower or working lower-middle class buy an EV.
I do
While your math is correct, I don’t think going by mileage alone is correct, especially in a city like LA where there is so much congestion and travel times are highly variable and consequently mpg suffers. Take the 405 from Culver City to Santa Monica and it might take you 20 -25 minutes to go the 12-15 miles or it might take 90 minutes in really heavy, stop and go traffic. Maybe cut your mpg in half; now the odometer increases only 15,000 miles in a year, which is reasonable.
I was driving a Ford F150 a Ford Ranger and a second Ford F150 making parts deliveries. 3 pick-ups over 2 years being retired after 100,000+ miles each. All miles driven by me so YES, some people drive much more than 30,000 annually
But some people come close. The wife’s got 400,000 km on her 2010 Impressa. Works out to nearly 28,000 miles per year on average. Seems likely she went over 30k miles some of those years.
Just raise the price of electricity used by EVs. Should be simple, they keep telling us its green after all. Just seperate that green electricity and charge more for it. Simples.
The true cost of electric vehicles is coming to the fore and it isn’t pretty.
That should help to get rid of a few EVs and quite a few Democrat Voters.
The UK pays 57.5p/litre plus VAT at 20% (sales tax) on petrol & diesel.
EV owners seem to think they’ll be subsidised for ever, they appear not to realise, as the tax take from ICE vehicles declines, they’ll be taking the slack up.
It’s already $1000/EV/yr. in California which is equal to tax on about 2300 gallons. That’s a lot more than most people pay in gasoline taxes if you do the math.
Only about 80% of that is “fuel tax substitution” – high priced IC vehicles are around $200 for registration, from what I just looked up.
Now, I’m going to take your 2300 gallons calculation at face value, not being a Californian that it matters to me to replicate your work there. That works out to tax substitution on 1840 gallons a year, or 35 gallons a week. That might be high, or not, considering the state of California highways.
No it $100.00 And it starts in 2020
Well, that’s the end of EV sales in Illinois, if it passes. I wonder if we’ll see the equivalent of yellow vest protests if the follow through with the gas tax.
Typical leftist. The solution to any problem is to raise taxes. Then mismanage the funds so badly, the original purpose for the tax gets lost.
“Typical leftist. The solution to any problem is to raise taxes. Then mismanage the funds so badly, the original purpose for the tax gets lost.”
Absolutely spot on SMC.
Not just leftist but bureaucratic government agencies do this all the time – it’s their reason d’etre.
Just how on Earth do we get that particular herd culled.
Use the Chinese method. Only employ eunuchs in order to cull the bureaucratic herd. This should stop them breeding. I suspect there would only be few recruits each year.
nobody protested significantly about their mismanagement while they continued to kick the tax can down the road
This Illinois dem “proposal” is structured to create a big backlash so they (the dems) can then be “reasonable”, step back, be nice, and only raise the gas tax to $0.35, while they raise the EV registration to $200.
Interesting first salvo. I assume the added registration fee is to make up for the gas tax electric cars don’t pay. $1000 seems a bit high though. Assuming the average motorist drives 12,000 miles per year at say 22 miles per gallon, equates to about 550 gallons of gas per year. The Illinois driver on average currently pays about $105 in gas tax. By more than doubling the tax a motorist would be spending an additional $137 more in gas tax per year. So the electric vehicle registration fee is about 4 times higher than if they were paying gas tax alone. What is the normal automobile registration fee in Illinois?
Registration fee is $101 plus most municipalities have a city sticker fee. The state gas tax is about a quarter of the local taxes paid.
Adam
Please tell me where in the UK petrol or diesel costs only 57.5 p per litre plus vat? A litre here costs around £1.25 per litre including taxes
However you are right that Ev’s are heavily subsidised and as the take take declines as they become more popular then they must pay their fair share.
however 1000 dollars registration from a previously low base seems onerous
Adam is correct. UK fuel duty is £0.57.5. p £1.25 is the full price including all components.
https://www.gov.uk/tax-on-shopping/fuel-duty
No, Adam didn’t give the full price for a litre which it’s necessary to do so Americans can see the Silly prices that we in Europe pay.his reply made it seem as if the price he quoted was the final price.
Tonyb
The alternative would be to put a black box in all EVs and make them pay for the miles driven each quarter equal to what the gas tax would be for the same mileage driven with ICE. You would of course have to work out a formula to convert the EV miles per vehicle to miles per gallon of gas in a similar ICE vehicle. They would also have to put in a shut down switch on those vehicles so when the vehicle is not brought in on time and the tax goes unpaid, the government can shut it down. A GPS locator would also be needed in order to find and confiscate the offending vehicle.
Seems a bit excessive. Cars already have a method for logging milage, the odometer. And it’s already a crime to tamper with it.
And a system for submitting that milage already exists. It’s just used for something else. My Insurance company gives me a discount for useing it. It includes an app for my smartphone and a Bluetooth gizmo that was stuck in my car (with double sided tape. No wiring). It’s able to record and upload to them my driving metrics, like acceleration, braking, and turning G’s, routes take driving times and time of day, ect.
And about once a year it prompts me to enter my milage and take a picture of my odometer.
As for people who don’t comply, we already have a system for dealing with that too. And if you ever forget like I did one time to put that little sticker on your license plate, you’ll get to see it in action.
“Drivers license and registration, please”
^_^ so polite, that ‘please’.
Excessive yes, that is what governments do when they want your dollars but pretend they don’t.
Your state still has the stickers? My state (like many others) hasn’t had the “little sticker on the license plate” for years. Though I heard on the radio the other week that there’s a politician seeking to bring them back.
If not the sticker, how does your state show you’ve paid your vehicle registration fee?
In my (non US State) there is no outward sign that the car is registered except that it has plates (which may or may not be current).
However if you get pulled over , or if caught by random licence plate camera points, you can be left walking and facing hefty fines. Compliance is pretty good, certainly no worse that when playing with stickers.
The licence plate cameras tend to round up quite a few miscreants, because if you are stupid enough to do that , you often have some or all of no licence, and unroadworthy car, outstanding fines or warrants or are an illegal immigrant. Its amazing what the round up at those stops.
If gas tax was eliminated completely you could use the toll road system to collect fees. Sure we would have more toll roads but it’s a fee for use. It wouldn’t be that hard to collect the mileage on a vehicle and add that to the toll transponder.
Except you have County roads and State roads that are local in nature and could not possibly be tolled. Unless your desire is to clog up daily traffic. That idea would last about 3 days before the yellow vests would sell out.
Hey, this improves the proposal quite a bit. The black box (BB) will need to sealed and registered, and calibrated at least once a year. All of those actions will require a minimum of one, and with ‘good’ management, up to three new bureaucracies to perform the actions. That means at least one additional (again, maybe up to three) fee for each car [no grandfathering permitted {pun intended} here!] each year. So, with just a little imagination (the most a legislator can muster without hiring a consultant), this could double the revenue of the bill – and these are FEES, not taxes, so who can object? /sarc off*
*Might not be sarcasm if the IL Assembly hears about it…
EVs are inherently subsidized by not having to pay their fair share of road use, maintenance, and repair taxes. Virtue signalling while avoiding fair use road taxes is what pastes that smug smirk on EV drivers faces.
No, our smug smirk is knowing we are saving the planet from the mouth breathing knuckle draggers and we will in all likelihood go to heaven when we die.
Yeah, and getting a free ride.
Joel,
You use one myth (“saving the planet”) to justify your bigoted view of those that expose your true motives. Unfortunately, your ‘superiority’ complex earns no credit towards heaven, unless you repent those failings as a human being.
‘Getting a free ride’, aka greed for other peoples money’, is the core motivation. All else is rationalization, attempting to ‘put lip stick on the pig’. Pay your fair share, Joel!
Both of you forgot the sarc tag. I know, it’s probably obvious, but all the same…
Uh… is your electric grid powered 100% by renewable energy? Do you batteries not need to disposed as hazardous waste? Pretty sure neither of those is true… so all you did was move the pollution away from your local area so you could act holier-than-thou to those of us that understand that EV’s don’t reduce pollution.
joel,
The planet is fine. It doesn’t need saving from humans. However, we humans do need saving from other humans that are Crack-Pots.
amending ddpalmer’s comment above:
“Well [bicycles] use the roads and bridges. And the roads and bridges need to be maintained which traditionally has been paid for through gasoline/fuel taxes. Since [bicycles] don’t use/pay those taxes some other method for the [bicycles] to pay their fair share of the cost of the infrastructure they use is needed.”
Around Metro Boston there’s been a big push to create bikes-only lanes that wind up choking regular traffic.
The arrogant little bike-riding effs routinely run red lights, jump up onto sidewalks and do whatever suits them.
$1000 a year registration might thin their ranks. It would be a good start.
Easy girl. I ride a bike just about everyday. But I judiciously stay off the roads. Here in Raleigh we have a pretty extensive greenway system so you can ride to places or just ride for exercise and enjoyment without stepping on your toes.
The last thing I want to do is ride in traffic. The big boat rule applies to all bike riders. You can have the right of way and be in the right, but in any collision between a bike and a car, the car always wins.
@rbacock:
I would like you to come here and talk to the bicyclers on our city streets. It’s great that in Raleigh you have options that allow you to stay out of traffic, but we’ve got lots of college kids hurling down our roads every day—even though bus services abound.
I agree with Anna. I drove city buses in Bend, OR, including to and from the 2 college campuses in town. College bikers seem to have the worst road manners. A common habit they have is running up on a sidewalk just before a roundabout, then using the crosswalks just before the roundabout to cross over to the road to the left, instead of going around the roundabout to the 3rd exit. They seem to think they have the rights of a pedestrian while riding in the crosswalk.
SR
“You can have the right of way and be in the right, but in any collision between a bike and a car, the car always wins.”
Like the rules for driving underground. Give way to anything bigger than you. So as a Landcruiser, you give way to everything. Simple as that. And if you get run over in your Landcruiser, it is YOUR FAULT because clearly you failed to give way.
To be honest I sort of miss not working in an actively dangerous environment. If you work in a ‘safe environment’ you start to assume the default condition is ‘This Place Is Safe’ and are shocked and surprised when an incident happens.
Work in an actively dangerous environment and the default attitude to everything new you see is to assume it probably wants to harm you. What is that puddle? Dunno. Probably acid. Don’t step in it. What is that wire? Dunno. Probably live. Don’t touch it. It is not a state of constant fear, it is a realisation that this is the real world and the real world is dangerous.
My Point? There is a bit of a mindset that the ‘powers that be’ are required to provide a 100% safe environment where you are free to do what you want. If anything goes wrong it is not your fault so by extension you do not need to take responsibility for your actions. The world should be SAFE and if it is not then the government has failed you.
Unfortunately that is not how the world works. Yes is it considered a crime for car owners to hit pedestrians with a motor vehicle, but that doesn’t mean you, the pedestrian, shouldn’t look both ways before stepping off a curb. Being legally right will do sweet sod all if you are jam under someone’s wheels.
In Vancouver, the black spandex brigade rides at night without even a reflector – and if your F150 hits them, its your fault. Here in a community with an industrial history, a lot of people wear reflective vests just to go for a walk.
A pedal bicycle (2 wheels) and a pedal tricycle (3 wheels) each weighing roughly maximum, 50 pounds, less rider, impacts the roads how much? Completely agree on the idiot riders of bicycles and tricycles that negatively impact traffic flow but traffic flow and impact to the road surface are 2 completely different things. Property taxes also pay for road infrastructure and many adult riders have homes, so it is not solely gasoline taxes that pay for roads.
Your argument is over simplified. Have you considered the ground pressure?
(spoiler – I haven’t. It’s Friday arvo, I have a box full of cupcakes on the table behind me and I am lazy. Yes, I AM a horrible person, deal with it : D )
Your argument is also based around the idea of sustainment of existing, rather than acquisitions. It doesn’t matter if a bike does absolutely zero damage to a bitumen bike path each time it rides over it, it is the fact the bike path needed to be made in the first place.
What is the current currency for tax guilt these days? Hospitals? Schools? Think of all the new schools they could build if they weren’t spending so much putting down new bike paths!
Remember, the only things that grow on trees are leaves and seed pods, and you still need to harvest the seed pods.
We had our dead end road newly paved a few years ago .. so very low traffic .. and the first cracks showed up the very night temperatures dropped to about -10F. I know this because I walked my boys to the bus stop every morning. And those same cracks have widened. So yes road maintenance is required even if bikes themselves cause no damage.
And the real question is how much of these new revenues will actually go to infrastructure? 100%? 80% 50%
Just about every state uses the honey pot of gasoline taxes to subsidize other programs and education.
In other news, Chicago is killing the rest of the state. Much like NYC sucks the life out of most of New York state. Good luck all who live there. You are going to need it.
rbabcock – you stopped at 50%? You most have a lot more faith in our politicians then I do! I assumed it’s a lot like CO2 measurments.
Measured in Parts per Million
~¿~
An EV is about 20% heavier than an IC car so needs to pay for the additional wear on the road.
It’s a loose/loose situation.
My first impression was, “Holy $#!+”
At $.44/g that tax will be higher than CA at $.36/gal.
We drive a bit more here in CA so I average about 15,000 miles/year. And for some ‘progressive’ reason our vehicle registration fees are based upon the ‘value’ of the car and not a use metric like axle weight. Their rationale appears to be income redistribution as newer more expensive cars do not impose greater wear/tear on the road systems as older poorly maintained vehicles.
Regardless at $1000/year registration for EV’s that seems a bit high if even to account for unpaid fuel taxes.
A new $40,000 ICE powered sedan pays about $550/yr for CA registration. Add the approximate $245 in gas taxes that accounts for about $800 in gas taxes and registration fees for an ICE vehicle.
So it would seem that the electric vehicle owners are subsidizing the ICE drivers to the tune of a bout $200 per year.
Don’t forget electric bills carry taxes and fees for usage so when the EVs plug in at home those taxes and fees will increase with the increase of the usage. EVs are looking better and better.
Tom,
In CA there are time of use rates for residential EV customers. In PG&E’s area they look like this for Rate A:
Summer Peak $0.48889
Part-Peak $0.26503
Off-Peak $0.12559
The time periods look like this:
All Year
Peak: 2:00 pm to 9:00 pm Monday through Friday
3:00 pm to 7:00 pm Saturday, Sunday and Holidays
Partial-Peak: 7:00 am to 2:00 pm Monday through Friday, except Holidays
9:00 pm to 11:00 pm Monday through Friday, except Holidays
Off-Peak: All Other Hours
“Four of Illinois’s last eight governors went to prison. We’re batting .500, if I’m counting correctly. I don’t know if that’s bad news (Illinois has more corruption) or good news (We’re better at catching the bastards). ”
============
You have to know going in, that politics in Illinois is a dangerous game.
Here in Indiana we see it differently. So far half of those Governors have gotten away Scott free.
And Remember, that’s were Obama was from, and he got away with it to. They clearly need to work on it.
~¿~
“WARMING TEMPERATURE MEASUREMENTS POLLUTED BY BAD DATA, RESEARCH CONFIRMS”
https://www.heartland.org/news-opinion/news/warming-temperature-measurements-polluted-by-bad-data-research-confirms?fbclid=IwAR1y1KFO-uLp2H5Mco5G2O5xUS-dE-LD9q-QIudh3LyLIMI9E8IGo67ZnGo
Doesnt matter, they’re going to impose the mileage tax soon enough.
I am going to have stickers made which I will place on EV charging stations whenever I see one. Most all gasoline or diesel pumps have cautions that people must be present when fueling in the event of a fuel spill.
My cautions will read, ‘Persons must be present at all times during charging to prevent electrical fires.’
I am appalled that people will just plug their EV into a station and then walk away.
Oddly they seem to be more prone to fires when parked than when actively charging. No unsafe at any speed, unsafe when standing still.
Legislator #1: “Hey, how can we end the yearly exodus of tens of thousands of people from Illinois?”
Legislator #2: “Raise taxes some more.”
Legislator #1: “Brilliant! Let’s go get drunk and watch the Cubbies!”
From the article: “A bill at the Illinois legislature proposes to raise the annual registration fee for electric vehicles (EV) from US$17.50 to US$1,000 and to more than double the gas tax from 19 cents to 44 cents per gallon, under a plan to fund infrastructure advanced by Democrat State Senator Martin Sandoval.”
According to http://www.gaspricewatch.com/web_gas_taxes.php The current gasoline tax in Illinois is 62.8 cents/gal including 18.4 cents federal tax. I don’t have hard numbers. but that’s likely more than the oil companies make in profit.
So now the EV owners cannot escape paying “gas tax”, and they still have to pay taxes on their electricity use to fuel their vehicle. LMAO
Sort of fitting that they have to pay it up front also, instead of as they go when using fuel. After all they were prepared to pay and exorbidant price up front for the EV and then claim delusionaly that their fuel was free or dirt cheap. Bit like solar panels, my electricity is free!!!! what about that $15,000 over there??? oh never mind that, my electrcity is free!!!!
Keep in mind, Illinois applies their sales tax to gasoline, along with gas taxes, making their prices already 20c+/gallon higher than surrounding states.
Illinois is selling itself as a Fair Tax State under our New Democratic Governor. Those who make more income should pay more taxes, and those who drive a Tesla usually have a higher income. Using the facts given in the enclosed website for gasoline taxes paid in Chicago (CookCounty) IL and using the US averages of vehicles driven 12,000 per year with 25 mi/gal, this equals 480 gallons of gas/year. Proposed new 2019 total gasoline tax and license plate fees would equal $436 ( $336 gas tax with $150 fee) for a combustion engine. Electric vehicle would pay the $1000 lincense plate fee, which is about twice the total paid as combustion engines. The 2018 total fees and gas tax for electric vehicles is only $18, so the new proposed increase is indeed very progressive.
Edit: The big disconnect in state tax (for example, wikipedia shows lower numbers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_taxes_in_the_United_States ) values seems to be whether sales tax is included. I quote the high number, as that represents all of the state’s taxes on gasoline, not just the excise tax.
That’ll help sales. Go for it.
Here is website showing Chicago IL gasoline taxes
https://capitolfax.com/2019/05/16/receipt/
I have never been able to understand state and federal budgeting.
If you have a gasoline tax of 20 cents to the gallon ten years ago, and you have twice as many drivers now, you should be collecting twice as much money to fund infrastructure. EXCEPT, they keep enforcing stricture mileage standards, so cars don’t need as much gas, so now you are collecting less money per mile driven. 44 cents a gallon for an average person driving 10,000 miles per year, at say 30 miles per gallon…that’s $147 a year.
If you collect $1,000 to register an electric vehicle per year, then no matter how little or much you drive it you pay the same. But what about electric cars from neighboring states? They get a free lunch. You also discourage people from buying the very thing you keep saying they ought to buy.
What you really want is to collect money based on use of roads, not gas or registration as a proxy. This leads to self-funding toll roads which everyone seems to hate (but not me). Tolls work for gas and electric cars, and work well for advanced highways. Everyone has to pay them, so no free lunches. Now all the “public” has to fund is the lesser roads through taxes.
Illinois needs to get a grip on spending before it raises taxes. Yeah, they will need to raise taxes, but if you just keep spending wildly then raising taxes solves nothing. Start trimming and shutting down government programs that do little. Get in control of pension spending. Start paying off debt.
“We haven’t updated our gas tax since 1990.”
Wat a poor unfortunate boilerplate argument based on the logic that negative events *must* be provoked.
Like, “it’s been decades since the last incident, so guys, get going into one already !”
(implicit palmface)
There is no perfect road usage fee system.
The advantage of a fuel tax is it captures road use by people driving through, including trucks. A registration fee only covers vehicles registered in the state.
Something must be collected from EV owners to compensate for not paying fuel taxes, but with others commenting above I think $1,000 is unreasonable. I strongly suspect the average EV is not driven as many miles per year as the average ICE vehicle, and I think something in the $200-$400 per year range would be reasonable.
I don’t believe EVs should be subsidized with tax credits, but I don’t believe they should be penalized with unreasonable usage fees either.
$18 to $1000 is quite a hike.
President Trump just yanked 1 billion back from Kali’s Browndoggle high speed rail
Looks simple, the state isn’t interested in having electric cars dip into the power grid. They certainly are too light to damage the roads in contrast to heavy trucking commerce. Thus an incentive to not own one…or two…lol ….that is registered. Think about the 4th Amendment as well.
https://wearechange.org/u-s-supreme-court-says-no-license-necessary-to-drive-automobile-on-public-highwaysstreets/
Yes, it doth appear the Constitution of the United State is once again being trampled upon. How many revolutions must one have? We will eventually run out of places to move as large cities, primarily made of genetic mutes (aka socialists) dictate state politics.
I wonder if gas taxes would be less popular if they were expressed in terms of dollars per tank. A tax of 44c/gal is $4.40 for a 10 gallon fill-up. It’s roughly $5 every time you go to the pump.
As a resident of said state, the method of the pols here is to propose something astronomical and then pretend to ‘compromise’ down to something merely outrageous. As we all know, one truck does the damage of 1,000 to 10,000 cars. Raise Road Diesel taxes in that proportion over gasoline.
Also unfortunate, this proposed tax money goes to the General fund. Never to be seen again.
Illinois is a great state to be from!
In Illinois many municipalities (Chicago AND Cook County) have their own taxes in addition to federal and state.
Rather clumsy first toddler steps by the overlords towards their ultimate Nirvana of mileage taxation methinks. After all they have to be seen to be level playing field and fair (except when it comes to renewables dumping practices of course) Give them something to squabble over with equity and later we can come over the top of it all with a fairer and larger mileage tax. Yes Minister 101.
this is why dems want us to all use EVs they can tax us more.
and for the record I am registered independent and do not vote according to a letter beside a candidates name.
I would suggest a wealth tax surcharge on EVs as long as it’s Illinois. Make that $5,000 per year. A tax on Cubs fans is also on the table.
What a bunch of crap. It’s not about funding “infrastructure”. It’s about trying to fund debt in that bankrupt state.