From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
By Paul Homewood
I’ve been forecasting this for a while:
From the Telegraph:
Electric vehicle (EV) drivers will be hit with a new pay-per-mile tax in the Budget, The Telegraph can reveal.
Under current plans, to be announced by the Chancellor on Nov 26, drivers of electric cars will be charged 3p per mile on top of other road taxes.
The scheme, set to kick in from 2028 after a consultation, will mean the average driver faces paying an extra £250 a year.
The Treasury will make the move amid falling fuel duty revenue as people move from petrol to electric cars. Up to six million people are set to be driving EVs by the time the tax comes in.
Full story here.
The enforced transition to EVs will eventually leave a £30 billion black hole. My guess is that the charge will have to rise to at least 10p to cover that shortfall.
The Telegraph explain how the system will work:
While the specifics are still discussed, The Telegraph can reveal that the scheme would be aligned to the annual payment of vehicle excise duty (VED), which affects all UK motorists. EV drivers have had to pay the charge since April.
The new element is being described as “VED+” and being framed as a way to get drivers of green cars to pay more each year.
EV drivers will be asked to estimate the number of miles they will drive in the year ahead and pay a fee, set in the current plan at 3p per mile.
If the owner does not drive that amount, some of the money carries over into the next year. If they drive more miles than estimated, they would top up their payment.
Presumably the driver would have to send a snapshot of his milometer each year when he renews his VED.
There are the inevitable howls of rage from the EV lobby, who thought they could sponge off the rest of us for ever. And there are rightful concerns that governments will ratchet up the charge year after year, much in the way they used to do with ciggies – all in our own interest, of course!
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Oh well, I’ll not be moving “from petrol to EV” ‘cos I drive a diesel, so this won’t affect me at all.
Think again.
I think he was being sarcastic..
I won’t be moving either. They can take their electric fireball and shove it sideways. I will never own one.
I currently have two diesel cars, one in Australia and one in the UK. I preferred diesel because they couldn’t faff about adding ethanol (by force now in the UK, no choice). I’m hoping that both last me until I no longer drive, and have others drive me.
One is 13 and one as 15 years old. Both drive perfectly well. I’m hoping for 10 more years. Being a Volvo and a Toyota, I’m reasonably sure they’ll be ok, given adequate maintenance, although they both do some fairly hefty kilometres each year, as Australia and Europe are pretty large.
Try doing that with an EV!
Just over the transom yesterday; Size comparison of countries –
PS. I drive a diesel 1982 MercBenz 300TD … 3-liter inline 5-cylinder with turbo.
There are people complaining about this on the basis that petrol and diesel aren’t charged by the mile.
Yes we are you fracking idiots, where do you think all the tax on petrol goes?
Dipsticks
Gas tax, while once assigned to road maintenance, etc., is not just a budget line item to be spent is other areas as “deemed appropriate” by the legislatures.
No argument a per mile tax on EVs needs to be equivalent to the gas tax. Just like property taxes once funded local schools, it is just a scheme to separate working people from their money.
Aren’t EV’s those things that were supposed to be so much cheaper than the traditional stuff,
powered by the green energy that was supposed to be so much cheaper than the traditional energy ?
I guess they got cheaper once again.
If they get cheaper one more time people will get paid to drive EV’s.
“Ford Mulls Scrapping F-150 Lightning After Dismal Demand, Mounting Losses”
.
Ford is reportedly set to scrap the F-150 Lightning, once hailed by top executives as the company’s “modern Model T,” amid absolutely terrible demand. Production lines for the electric pickup remain paralyzed after an aluminum shortage halted operations last month.
.
A new Wall Street Journal report indicates that the F-150 Lightning is on the chopping block after $13 billion in EV losses since 2023. If accurate, this would make the money-losing truck America’s first major EV casualty.
.
https://www.zerohedge.com/technology/ford-mulls-scrapping-f-150-lightning-after-dismal-demand-mounting-losses
“Electric Pick Up” – says it all.
Cars can barely pull their electric weight.
Who in the world thought that a way heavier and more expensive model would succeed?
EV’s are for 15 minute cities.
PickUps are for rural areas – and usually serve a real purpose..
They are not driven by men with shaved legs and handbags.
And those urbanites who buy them,buy them to show off = and this won’t work without combustion sound.
And these suburban kids don’t have that much money to buy EV Pick Ups.
The UK version of the electric F-150 goes back decades:
If JB Pritzker were a car…
Rachel from accounts is absolutely desperate for revenue from wherever it can be obtained.
The EV Pay Per Mile idea goes something like this. The EV driver makes an estimate of how many miles they will drive over the year. At the end of the year if the vehicle covered less than the estimate, then there would be a way of being repaid – a reduction on the following year etc
If the vehicle has covered more than estimated, then you pay a top up charge.
Can anyone out there think of a more dozy and ill conceived method? And all because they cannot tax the fuel.
Easiest way to “tax” EVs would be to remove all subsidies and incentives. 😉
This ^
Tax them out of business by removing subsidies for EVs and subsidies for EV charging infrastructure
bingo!
The biggest subsidy is getting to use the roads that others built and maintain, for free.
Especially the £3,750 subsidy mislabelled by the BBC as a discount
How will the government know the true figure? Will the vehicle send out the info via WiFi?
The odometer is always noted at MOT
So 3 years before any notification. Sell beforehand.
It isn’t my idea!
Clocked!
If you sell at a dealer, they will check and report the mileage.
If you sell to a private party, the title transfer papers will probably include an entry for the current mileage.
We have a winner.
In the brave new world everything you do will be measured and tracked.
They are modern EVs. Surely they can communicate their odometer data back to a central location? Probably already doing this to a location in one country.
You’d have to be quite naive to think that she’s going to just have a mileage charge on EVs. There are allsorts of cameras on UK roads ANPR is everywhere, so no problem gathering the data. The government via HMRC (His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs) are able to (or will be soon) access bank accounts of pensioners to make sure they’re not cheating. The MOT (annual test of vehicle safety, roadworthiness aspects and exhaust emissions) records mileages annually.
No vehicle is immune
The allegedly 10% of cars on UK roads running around with doctored or unreadable plates. Not sure its as high as 10% as that comes from a govt dept campaigning for higher fines for unreadable plates. As for the higher fine making any difference annual road tax discs were made digital on the basis it would reduce the number of untaxed cars on the road. Strangely it made no difference at all.
They could tax the fuel. EV chargers are by law separately metered, and on different tariffs. It would be very simple to add a tax to EV supply.
Some might choose to evade that by charging at 3kW from a household plug, but half hourly smart meter data is probably good enough for estimating a surcharge that would discourage it.
re: “The EV driver makes an estimate of how many miles they will drive over the year.”
.
SOUNDS LIKE quarterly income tax pre-payments businesses make …
And it depends upon the EV owner providing a photo of their milometer. How can one be sure that it is the milometer in their car, and the current reading?
Eh, actually, they could tax the electricity used to recharge EV’s, most of it anyway.
A very large proportion of electricity for EV’s is from dedicated commercial high capacity EV charging stations. This electricity could very easy be taxed at point of sale.
True, EV owners re-charging from their domestic systems would be a more difficult issue, but requiring each EV owner to install a “smart” meter system that would detect EV charging and identify it so the tax could be included in the electricity bill would likely be feasible.
More cozy and ill conceived? Nope.
But putting the tax on the electricity provided at charging stations would have been more appropriate.
Of course they can also increase fuel duty as well so that the hit is shared around… I wouldn’t put it past them!
“so that the hit is shared around”
Was that a joke? Fuel duty AND VAT are paid on petrol/diesel at the pump. No free rides, no incentives; in fact, quite the reverse. Loadsa charges.
And directly proportional to the miles driven (& fuel efficiency of the car), Labour’s problem is that whilst they want less ’emissions’, i.e. cars to become ever more efficient, that loses them tax revenue. Problem is, whichever way it goes, WE lose! It never occurs to them that they should perhaps spend less.
Someone has to pay the wars.
No, the illegals…
“More than 1000 small boat migrants have crossed the Channel in the last 24 hours alone” – Guido Fawkes
The payments for their welcome and subsequent subsidies will be greater than the EV surcharge, which will eventually vanish due to people junking their EVs, but the raft people subsidies will stay for decades.
How to screw the UK in one easy lesson
Trump knows what to do with boats he doesn’t approve of. 🙂
Wasn’t that what the Vickers water cooled noisemaker was made for?
The same problem applies to cigarettes (or any other sin tax). Have high taxes to discourage smoking and then whinge when the smoking goes down and revenue decreases.
And the solution? Increase the tax!
They do the same thing over and over and expect the results to change.
Some reckon that contraband cigarettes are now half the market in the UK.
Using your own generator to charge an EV probably doesn’t pay except compared with public fast chargers (but it wouldn’t be fast charging). You’d also have to figure on towing it.
Worse. We pay VAT on the fuel at 20%. We pay duty on the fuel at 53p per litre. We then pay VAT at 20% on the duty, making it 64p a litre.
A tax on a tax. On money you’ve already paid tax on, don’t forget.
Seems ripe for a Boston Tea Party complete with torches and pitchforks.
Duty is levied when the fuel leaves bonded storage (basically remaining refineries plus a few former refineries that are now import terminals). That ensures the collection cost is extremely low and the compliance is extremely high.
Currently half of what we pay at the pump in the UK is taxes, so effectively we are already paying 100% duty.
But you have a great road system where it not for potholes, constant roadworks for miles and miles etc etc etc.
“4000 holes in Blackburn, Lancashire….”
good catch!
My wife (an English girl of Welsh ancestry) visit the UK and often drive a hire car around the country. Your roads are in excellent condition. Come on over to California and sample our roads.
I was going to point and laugh, and say HA-HA like Nelson, but I am trying to cut back on my schadenfreude. Too much of a good thing don’t you know. But with the Climate Cartel collapsing, and COP30 ready for the dustbin, it is becoming more and more difficult. Oh, the heck with it.
How to manage your Schadenfreude – You’re Wellcome…
A.N. Englishman
I have read that EV cars are heavier than average cars and cause more road damage. In particular, from a dead start, the wheels of EV cars spin up much faster than average cars and therefore cause road damage.
The souped up milk floats weigh tonnes and create a lunar roadscape.
This they have done entirely tax free with plenty of subsidies, too.
It is rain that causes most road damage.
Rain is caused by CO2 so once the transition is complete, this problem will dry up.
Deleted, repeat of next post.
No, I think you’ll find it is ice that does the damage. And a cheapskate wafer thin dressing of tarmac.
HERE in Texas we get little ice, HOWEVER, after (during) a rain potholes appear on account of tire-action developing hydraulic action that pushes water into cracks that had developed in the pavement, so there is that …
Water an dice accelerate the damage to already compromised road surfaces. The damage is further accelerated by the passage of heavy vehicles over waterlogged or frozen subsurfaces.
Vehicle wise, it’s laden HGVs that do the damage. I ran some calculations, based on damage related to 4th power of axle weight. A Vehicle Mile Unit (VMU) of damage is 1 for a 1.68 tonne family estate car per mile. ((1.68/2)^4)x2 (and even less for smaller vehicles). A 6 axle HGV fully laden is 42 tonnes, so produces ((42/6)^4)x6, or 14,406 VMUs per mile. Empty it might weigh 16 tonnes, contributing about 300VMUs per mile. A 3.5 tonne large EV SUV is similar to a large van for weight, and racks up 18.75 VMUs per mile.
If we use an average of 8,000 VMUs for HGVs, then the 16.6bn vehicle miles works out as 132.8 trillion VMUs per annum, whereas the 256.1bn annual car vehicle mileage will be 3 orders of magnitude lower – a rounding error. Even switching them all for big EVs would only see them get to 5% of VMUs.
Actually its the freeze/thaw cycle over winter.
Hydraulic action of tires across cracks/crevices in pavement is a destructive action too … we see it after rains here in Texas.
https://ascelibrary.org/doi/10.1061/JPEODX.0000065
Abstract
It is generally believed that, irrespective of pavement type, the water on the pavement surface, water buildup in the internal voids, and water pressure through cracks due to traffic action play a significant role in the functional and structural failure of the pavement.
Although extensive studies on water-related material degradation have been conducted in the last 50 years, research on measuring water pressure due to dynamic action of load and its impact on pavement performance is very limited. The influence of tire characteristics on asphalt surfaces is also very limited.
This study attempts to address the impact of water and tire parameters in the pavement subjected to dynamic loading. The idealized pavement consists of a 100-mm concrete slab with a 2-mm continuous fissure. The concrete pavement was overlaid with a 20-mm semipermeable asphalt surface to evaluate the influence of asphalt surfaces on the water pressure. The slabs were submerged with 2- and 4-mm water and were subjected to 5- and 10-kN loads applied at 1, 5, 10, and 15 Hz. The loading plate was designed to simulate new and partly worn tires with a square and a square with a channel pattern with up to 8-mm thickness to represent tread characteristics.
It was found that dynamic water pressure increases significantly when high-frequency loading is combined with a square type of tread, and water is trapped inside the groove, which generates pumping action. The water pressure also increases with thread thickness. Load magnitude and depth of surface water have a marginal impact on the water pressure in the pavement.
—————–
https://ridgelineasphaltsurfacing.com/2025/08/the-science-behind-potholes-understanding-the-formation-process/
Interestingly, potholes can also form in warmer climates where freeze-thaw cycles are minimal. In these cases, poor drainage, persistent rainfall, and repeated pressure from traffic cause the underlying soil or roadbed to erode. Over time, this creates subsurface voids that compromise the pavement’s stability and lead to sudden collapses.
That does not explain the woeful condition of the roads around here, especially after the heavy rains we have had earlier this year.
We don’t have a freeze/thaw cycle.
I think it’s more complex than it looks. Generally, the road surface is a matrix of incompressible rock, held together by flexible bituminous compounds.
Together with a substrate of varying composition, the road surface actually flexes slightly when the vehicle’s tyre compresses it. Over time, the minute cracks which can appear at the binder/aggregate interface as a result, absorb things like dust and water, leading to an ongoing loss of adhesion, and a permanent microscopic fissure.
This goes from bad to worse. Given water on the surface, hydraulic action opens the fissures, extending cracks, and flushes aggregate away. Freezing conditions stiffen the bitumen, removing its ability to flex, so it cracks and flies away. If water is present, and freezes, then its expansion accelerates breakdown.
When a small “hole” is created, then it rather quickly becomes a larger, deeper one, physical impact on the far side, coupled with erosion all round, creates a situation where the main function of the road surface matrix seems to be to hold the potholes in place!
Maybe fuel excise and taxes could be supplanted by a charge calculated on distance travelled, tyre loading as weight divided by contact area, and ultimate power available per tyre.
i’m only guessing that these factors correlate to road surface wear – no expertise claimed. Idle curiosity at best.
Thanks for reading this far.
I don’t think that’s true.
Spinning wheels problems have been solved decades ago.
I don’t see why it should be a problem with EV’s where everything else is heavily monitored?.
If the problem were real, they’d be wasting tires at a much higher rate,
and there should be tiremarks all over the place at crossroads,parkings and traffic lights.
One should also expect a way higher rate of low speed incidents.
“One should also expect a way higher rate of low speed incidents”.
Dunno. I always take extra care when i am behind either a Nissan Micra OR an EV. Both display erratic driving but f different reasons.
An EV accelerates super fast (opposite w the Micra) but often the driver breaks hard to avoid clashing into the car in front which doesnt accelerate at the same level (in case of a Micra in front a double whammy).
I’m guessing you, like me, have a manual gearbox?
EVs are classed as Automatic in the UK. One has either a manual or automatic driving licence. A manual licence covers automatics, it doesn’t work the other way round.
EV’s should be able to accelerate way faster than any combustion vehicle as they are less limited to release of power.
But I do not see why this should be a problem to contain or nerf an overhead of power/torque .
Except if they are designed to accelerate that fast as selling point.
And yes – if you regularly observe erratic driving during start this should lead to more EV’s crashes for offensive reasons , while Micras could also be above average but below EV’s for defensive reasons.
It’s not wheel spin; it’s increased force to the road surface placing more mechanical stress on the road. EV tyres are denser to survive the higher pressures required to support the extra weight as well, so they impart more force as a matter of course, but combined with the high torque generated by an electric motor, they’re doing as much damage as a 6 wheeler.
Don’t believe everything you read! EV’s are NOT considerably heavier than their comparable ICE vehicles. A simple google search on an EV and it’s comparable combustion engine vehicle regards their curb weights will reveal the truth. Yes, battery packs for EV’s weigh a thousand pounds, but the engine, transmission, drive shafts, differentials and fuel tank of a combustion counterpart vehicle comes to about the same weight and are not part of an EV.
And yes, an EV has maximal torque from a standstill, but their tires are made of a softer compound so it’s their tires that wear out faster, not the road. Burning rubber happens all the time with combustion vehicles and it simply leaves some of the tire on the roadway, in a black streak.
EV’s are a dumb solution to a non existent problem, but they are not heavier, nor do they tear up the road any more than ICE vehicles (I have a Honda mini van, and a full sized Chevy van – the Honda weighs as much as most Tesla models, and the Chevy is twice the weight of any EV car and there are several orders of magnitude more Hondas and Chevy’s on the road than EV’s)
But EV’s should pay road taxes as all combustion vehicle owners do with fuel taxes….
I beg to differ. A Tesla model X at 5390 lbs weighs just over 2500 lbs more than my Ford Customline and 1500 lbs more than my 92 F150. The lightest Tesla the model 3 is still 1000 lbs more than my car.
Asking DDG: “What is average weight of an EV versus ICE car.”
Electric vehicles (EVs) are generally about 10% to 15% heavier than their internal combustion engine (ICE) counterparts, primarily due to the weight of the battery. The average weight of an EV can range from around 3,500 to over 5,500 pounds, while ICE cars typically weigh less, depending on the model.
Image from https://evenergyhub.com/ev-car-weight-vs-ice/
“Burning rubber happens all the time with combustion vehicles …” Not where we live, so “all the time” isn’t accurate.
I drive a Civic sedan. It’s curb weight is quite a bit lower then the smallest Tesla, which as far as interior space, isn’t much different. But your point is well taken that all the ICE equipment isn’t in the EV, so it isn’t that much heavier, if at all.
All you peasant scum need are sturdy sandals and public transport. It is presumptious for the lower classes to drive.
Ludicrous scheme, expensive to administrate and easily cheated.
How is self reporting expensive to administrate.
Since the cars are checked periodically, the most you can do is to delay what you need to pay.
Charles…..
Ever thought of running the occasional Caption Contest?
dweebs! 🙂
The name’s Bond. Green Bond. Ministry of silly sods.
I saw a photo of Miliband recently that made him look like Dan Dare’s arch enemy, the Mekon.
Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dumb
Brigitte and Emmanuel Macron of UK?
“Oh look Prime Minister, there’s a bit of Wensleydale!”
New tribute band announces tour dates:
‘Tears for years’.. everybody wants to rule the world..
or:
“Sorry, I thought you said dress appropriately for a bellend”..
“The enforced transition to EVs will eventually leave a £30 billion black hole. My guess is that the charge will have to rise to at least 10p to cover that shortfall.”
Smart people will ditch their EVs before paying 10p, or £750 a year.
My next-door neighbour’s BMW EV will be 3 years old soon. He hates it and is going to replace it with a diesel.
Just add a tax on tires. With the extra weight of the batteries, EVs eat tires like some folks eat lunch at a buffet.
As this might be the most fair scheme, it probably will be the last idea a government might have.
Not a good idea. Tyres are now quite expensive, so already drivers are avoiding replacing them when they should on safety grounds. Tyre wear/defects are the biggest cause of MOT failures already.
In Wisconsin, I am surcharged every year to renew the registration for my hybrid. The justification is that I’m not paying gas tax.
Absolute f*&$ing stupidity. Every bit of electricity my car uses is generated on-board from combustion of gasoline.
Continuing the rant, I’ve never hated a car worse than my Sante Fe. Filled with technology that is not ready for prime time that you cannot set to default to “off”. Every drive, I have to sit there waiting for the applications to boot (takes way too long) so I can manually shut off that crap.
You are a robot – but that’s OK 🙂
Yes, I am a meat robot created by my genes to carry them around.
If was referring to a Chan Wook Park movie – it failed.
You are more the Nexus 6 type.
Not familiar. I’ll investigate.
Nexus 6 – those were the rogue replicants in Blade Runner? (who were the most human. What a movie.)
It’s problem the softest of Parks movies – but with a lot of charm.
I’m a cyborg – but it’s OK
is the title.
That is why I like my 53 Ford. The only electronics it has, uses vacuum tubes and a reboot, is the new pair in the trunk. 🙋♂️ 😉 🤣
Awwww, don’t be churlish! All that technology is there to keep you safe – the manufacture knows you’re an idiot, and likely to actually put your vehicle in motion.
Even governments know how dangerous moving vehicles are. Urban speed limits are being reduced, as it is well known that the slower the vehicle moves, the less dangerous it is, F=mv^2, and all that.
The solution is obvious – reduce the speed limit to walking pace, and enforce it by requiring an elderly (or physically disabled) person to walk in front of the vehicle waving a red flag, as a warning the vehicle is either about to move, or actually moving. This will create employment for the elderly and disabled, and flag manufacturers. Roads will last longer, the road toll will diminish, and road rage incidents will drop – due to the calm induced by proceeding at a sedate and leisurely pace.
For the snobbish, sedan chairs and rickshaws will not require a flag-waver, because the bearers or pedallers (as the case may be) will also be required to be physically handicapped or elderly.
See? Simple.
Inevitable. No way the government would pass up a chance to tax you.
Let me tell you how it will be
There’s one for you, nineteen for me
Cos I’m the taxman, yeah, I’m the taxman
Should five per cent appear too small
Be thankful I don’t take it all
Cos I’m the taxman, yeah I’m the taxman
If you drive a car, I’ll tax the street
If you try to sit, I’ll tax your seat
If you get too cold I’ll tax the heat
If you take a walk, I’ll tax your feet
Taxman!
Cos I’m the taxman, yeah I’m the taxman
Britain used to tax light, by means of a window tax. Also had a per-brick brick tax, but the cunning rich people started using bigger bricks. The Government responded by increasing the tax on heavier bricks.
And so it goes.
I recently saw an Audi e-tron with a license plate which read YGOGAS
I’ll tell you YGOGAS. If I buy a brand new gasoline powered Audi, fifteen years from now it will still be worth something. If I buy a brand new Audi e-tron, fifteen years from now it will only be worth its value as scrap; because almost no one will be willing to spend twenty thousand dollars to put a new battery in a fifteen year old car.
$20K today. In 15 years you can probably triple that.
The same general principle holds: No matter how much money you give to government, it’s never enough, they always want more…
M. Thatcher said it correctly.
The final result must be that EVs will cost more to fuel than ICE. You cannot get around this. Electricity, before tax, is far more expensive than gas/diesel before tax. The government will be driven to getting the same tax revenue from EVs as it does now from ICE, therefore it will have to set the tax at the same level, and the result, if it stops there, will be higher fuel cost for the EVs
How this will spill over into the car market, new and used? Very hard to see. It must lower sales of EVs, and that must result on manufacturers failing to meet EV quotas and getting fined – or stopping production.
But it will not stop there. The logical consequence must be more used ICE cars kept longer. The logical government reaction to this must be to raise ICE fuel tax higher than EV electricity cost — to a level where an ICE car costs the same in fuel to run as an EV.
How much will ICE fuel have to rise to balance the system? Double current costs? But then you have the same problem again, raise the tax take from ICE and it becomes more and more expensive to phase them out.
They seem to be between a rock and a hard place. The only real solution would be to get the price of electricity to charge EVs at the same level pretax as gas/diesel to fuel ICE. Then tax at the same level. But to do that they will have to abandon net zero in power generation, get rid of all those wind turbines and solar panels. No way will the present government do that.
I don’t see any way out of this for them. And I don’t see any plausible scenario in which the cost of driving stays affordable. Which means travel will reduce, and extra costs will affect almost everything where transport is a cost. Everything, in short.
Maybe I am missing something? I don’t see how replacing a cheap fuel with a more expensive one is going to lead to anything else, if you are determined to retain the amount of tax from fuel, which they seem to be.
But isn’t green electricity free?
As much as I want EV drivers to be treated the same as gas and diesel drivers I am against this move. In an effort to treat everybody the same the gas and diesel drivers should get tax cuts. That makes sense to me, there is no reason in the world to give worthless crappy government more money. They have already screwed us enough with the money they have.
‘Treated the same’ presumably means pay the same amount of tax on a given amount of fuel.
Its easiest to see if we take an example. Made up numbers, but it will show how it works. Suppose gas costs 60p a liter ex tax, and sells for 1.20 a liter including 60p tax.
Now suppose the same amount of power for an EV costs 1.00 ex tax. We then treat it the same as gas, so we add 60p tax.
Now we have ICE at 1.20 a liter and EV at 1.60 per equivalent.
This seems fine and fair, but there is a small problem, everyone refuses to buy EVs. So you have to make the fuel costs the same, so you add 40p/liter in tax to the gas.
Great, now it costs the same to run ICE or EV, 1.60/liter.
Guess what though. Now our receipts from EV fuel taxation have almost doubled. So our fiscal dependency on taxes on, and the use of, gasoline, have increased.
Never mind, we will just force everyone to move by gradually banning the sale of ICE cars. They are doing this in stages, ICE will be fully outlawed in 2030.
Wait a minute. Does this mean all those extra tax revenues from the gasoline are all going to vanish? Afraid so. Oh dear, what are we to do? Raise taxes on EV fuel again? But that was where we came in….
The problem is that they are trying to move everyone from a low fuel cost (ex tax) to a higher fuel cost (ex tax). And they are trying to do this while getting the same amount of tax as before the move and also while not raising prices of fuel. What they want is just to have the same tax revenue and the same prices for EV and ICE and for prices not to rise. But it cannot be done as long as electricity is more expensive than gasoline.
You could easily make electricity cheaper. Just close the windfarms and solar farms and stop with Net Zero. But of course Starmer is looking over his shoulder at the Greens and at his own left wing, and he lacks the nerve to take on that particular battle. He’s probably right, it would probably sink him and his party both. But so will the route he is presently going down.
Feel a bit sorry for him actually. Think about it, the poor guy is forced to sit in Cabinet meetings with Mad Miliband every couple of days and listen to what he knows is total nonsense, knows is leading the party and country off a cliff, and there’s absolutely nothing he can do to stop it or avoid being blamed for it.
Latest poll if an election were held today
Reform UK 386 seats
Greens 55 seats
Liberals 73 seats
SNP 46 seats.
Labour 25 seats,
Conservatives 17 seats
In a 650 seat Parliament. As the Telegraph remarks, we may be looking at the end of the two party system in the UK. Also some of us are looking anxiously at who replaces Farage and Tice. Because they will be replaced, and their replacements will be no more Mr Nice Guy. Britain is on its way to leading the world in electing a government consisting mainly of football hooligans.
I understand where you are coming from but my idea of equal treatment is that if EVs are taxed less than gas and diesel then lower the tax on gas and diesel. I don’t give a damn if government doesn’t get the money it wants. They are a bunch of greedy buggers who will waste what we give them.
Just haul them by rail all around the UK to feel good.
Suddenly there is a financial incentive for thousands of people to fiddle with the odometers of their EV’s…