UK Politics
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You mean to drop the fuel duty by 50%, and introduce EV charge in the same time, yes? That would be an equal treatment.
Sadly no, I don’t think the pay per mile model is the right way to fund our roads if we are still going to charge a large amount of road tax to everyone on top.
But if they want to encourage EV adoption and had no better ideas, they should have introduced a blanket 1p per mile for everyone.
People who bought an electric car on a tight budget and drive 12k a year have been hit with an extra £560 in costs per year in the last 8 months.
This is how it works at the moment. Huge amount of tax is included in the fuel price. This is now being extended to EV which according to your estimate will be paying roughly half of what other road users are paying. This is more than fair - especially if you take into account EV are much heavier and are putting disproportionate pressure on the roads.
Depends on what you are trying to achieve, we should be moving away from burning fuel, and this takes us a step back.
Also the heavier EV argument is a bit weak, they are not much heavier, and wear and tear when the roads that have to cope with 30ton lorries?
The road infrastructure needs to be maintained or we don’t get any deliveries, and the shops have no stock, it’s not just drivers that need the roads.
It was you talking about fairness.
These 30t lorries are paying significantly more tax than normal vehicles, nevermind EVs. Would you perhaps prefer vehicles to be taxed according to their weight?
It is vehicles using the roads and vehicle owners/keepers (not "drivers") paying the taxes - and rightly so.
No, it wasn’t, I didn’t mention fairness because that is not my point at all, my focus is moving away from ICE vehicles.
As long as all safety system weight is removed from the calculation then maybe! We don’t want companies sacrificing safety for weight reduction.
Also significant changes should only apply to new vehicles, so the rules don’t change retrospectively after people have already made significant financial decisions based on government policy.
That you?:
Normal cars are taxed per your own calculations twice as much as EVs. That is far away from "equal" treatment but at least EVs owners now will START contributing.
Fairness and equality are different words and mean different things, you also cut off the second half of that quote in an attempt to prove your point.
My MG4 weighs ~1.6 tonnes, taking a VW Golf as a roughly comparable ICE hatchback at ~1.4 tonnes it's really not that big an increase. Compare that to a Land Rover Sport at 2.5 tonnes for example, the EV weight thing is really overblown IMO.
You may have more cherries to pick somewhere.