this post was submitted on 20 May 2026
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When they tried this last year it was scrapped because there was no practical way to collect it. Are we going to have a national car registry? That would take more money than it would collect. If they just ask a question on tax filing, I'm just going to lie.
How are you Americans doing car registration? As someone from another country it sounds a little bit crazy to not have a national car registry. Is this on the state level? And if someone from Texas is caught speeding in Arizona, police has to as there for the ID of the owner? Or is there no registry at all? And why shouldn't states be able to collect a tax from their citizens?
Cars and drivers are registered on the state level, yes. There's an agreement that licenses from every state are valid in every other state, and infractions in any state are prosecuted by the jurisdiction in which it happens. There is no national registry, no. States can (and do) collect taxes and registration fees from drivers who reside in that state, but they don't typically collect on behalf of the federal government.
There's a reason cops ask for license and registration.
The US is a fake country. States have a massive amount of power, they control vehicle registration, sales tax, school programs... the federal government might as well not exist. The same applies to other so-called countries like Germany.
Germany btw has a central car and driving permit registration.
What's the population density like chief? Based on online stats Germany is 6x more dense than the US as a whole (mostly due to those big states you're comparing it to being < 100/mi².)
Hey there Captain!
If you combined Texas and California, you would have around the same population.
There are around six times more licensed drivers in the US than in Germany.
That really has nothing to do with the physical size of a country
Oh, I know. Different places have different factors. The point of me putting the image up was just another example of comparing Germany to the US that doesnt have any contextual similarity.
I dunno how this works, but I'd assume this national car registry already exists at the DMV because you have to register your car to drive it, no?
No. The registries are all state-level, though many states do allow other states to query their systems.
Oh I forgot they were state level, I'd guess Congress could either tell states to give them the list of electric cars or ask the states to do the deed for them. I guess that could be a hard task if every system is very different. Not sure.
In theory, constitutionally-speaking, Congress doesn't have jurisdiction to command that, and trying would cause a judicial battle that could last long enough for grown-ups to take back over.
And each state would "interpret" congress' direction differently.
My understanding is that this time they want to force the states to collect the fee on behalf of the federal government, with the threat that they'll withhold federal funding if the states don't do it. I don't see how they could possibly enforce that either, though.
It's the same way they raised the drinking age to 21 despite there being no national drinking age laws nor a theoretically legal/constitutional method for enacting one. The latter was, obviously, successful.
Yeah, but with drinking ages, states keep records of births and it's easy to add 21 to those, and the federal government can easily subpoena the records to see whether they're telling the truth. Plus, there wasn't a whole ton of political will to resist the drinking age change. But with EVs, there's a ton of political will to keep this from happening (including, notably, from the richest man in the world), which means that EV-friendly states like California have all the motivation in the world to find creative ways around such a law.
I could see them levying the tax, but also offering an EV registration fee credit that offsets it exactly, or not keeping records on the number of electric vehicles registered (that seems like it would be tricky, since it's easy to identify Rivians and Teslas), or finding some other clever way to tie this up in court until an adult gets into office and cancels it.