GoKawiilLawmakers have proposed yet another punitive tax on EVs, attempting to balance road budgets solely on the back of the ~2% of vehicles that are responsible for a vanishingly small percentage of road damage.
Meanwhile, gas taxes haven’t gone up since 1993… and some are trying to eliminate them entirely, during a global fuel shortage that EVs are the solution to.
The US is back with another unfair EV tax proposal, and it’s not any smarter than the rest we’ve seen.
The new Surface Transport Reauthorization Bill was announced yesterday by the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, with the shorthand name “BUILD America 250.” It’s being called a bipartisan compromise, between Sam Graves (R-MO) and Rick Larsen (D-WA), who introduced it.
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It’s an omnibus bill intended to deal with the next five years worth of transportation issues in the US, covering federal highway funding, transportation studies, public transportation, railroads and the like.
But, as we’ve become accustomed to here in the one country that seems dedicated to keeping its residents stuck in a dirty past where they are beholden to the most evil industry the planet has ever seen, it attacks clean transportation options while letting expensive, dirty ones get off without paying their fair share.
What the bill does
The bill includes a provision for an annual tax on electric vehicles, set at $130/year for fully electric vehicles and $35/year for plug-in hybrids. Those taxes also get an automatic annual increase of $5/year (thats 14% for the PHEVs and 4% for the BEVs), up to a cap of $150 and $50 each.
The taxes would be collected by states, and if states refuse to collect the tax, the federal government could punish them by withholding transportation funds. This is in contrast to a previous attempt which would have charged $200/year, but had no collection method attached and was dropped because it would have been too complicated to set up a national registration scheme.
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