For several years now, boosters of the failing energy transition have publicly dismissed critics who have speculated that their ultimate goal where transportation is concerned is not merely to shift private car owners to adopt EVs, but to make the cost of owning a car so expensive that all but the most elite in society give up their cars altogether. Anyone reaching that imminently logical conclusion based on the evidence at hand has been dismissed as a ‘conspiracy theorist,’ or something worse.
One easy way to make owning a car increasingly costly would be to tax drivers on a cents-per-mile basis. With EVs replacing some percentage of gas-powered cars, states are finding their slush funds of taxes collected at the gas pump dwindling and are looking for ways to get the revenue flowing again. Some states, like Texas, are doing that with a hefty annual fee on EVs, but taking that route is hard to hide and tends to get hubris-filled EV buyers into a tizzy about having to actually help pay for the roads their extremely heavy vehicles do so much to damage. Go figure.
So, politicians being politicians, many are looking for a way to do this that’s somewhat easier to hide and seems “fair,” at least on the surface. For this reason, we now see the politicians and regulators in California (because of course it’s in California – where else?) now running tests on assessing a new tax based on miles driven each year.
Hellbound and Down 