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[SwampNut]

A wise exciseman would base taxation on weight, which leaves very little room for argument.

Cas

I completely disagree on both points, it's the easiest to argue against.

[Grauteufel]

Out of curiosity is the argument against taxation based on mass/weight? Or have I missed something here 

My thoughts are that mass would be a pretty good one to base taxation on (currently here we have fuel tax and registration based on number of cylinders). Vehicles taxes are nominally for maintenance of the road network, with vehicle mass being the greatest wear factor on roads. Seems pretty fair too, larger vehicles are heavier, more powerful vehicles are heavier. These are the more expensive vehicle and the operators thereof most able to bear the taxation burden. Note I am only talking about private vehicles, commercial vehicle registration and costs are a whole other conversation.

[SwampNut]

I have a very heavy vehicle from 1982 which has a total of 75k miles on it.  It should have been taxed by weight for that time?  I've driven 3/4 million miles on other vehicles since then.

[Grauteufel]

Ah, I understand, and you make a very good point.

Mass and mileage is the solution, the ultimate road burdens. That would be fair on you, your heavy vehicle does more damage in the trips it makes and should get taxed more per distance, but your other vehicles which spend vastly more time on the roads will end up paying more (but at a lower rate)

[Specter]

Just automatically saying, heavier vehicles do more damage, is one dimensional thinking at best.  The damage is done by the load transferring onto the road, essentially in lbs per square inch / foot of contact area if you must.  A heavier vehicle has a bigger tire with more square inches in contact with the road than a small vehicle may, so it could work out evenly or even less wear from the bigger vehicle because the weight is distributed more evenly thus less impact on the road at contact point.  An 18 wheeler carrying a light load, could put a lot less weight per tire on the road than your pickup especially if it's an EV. yet by your taxation methods would be taxed an insane amount of money.  But hey, what's not to love about inventing new ways to take the working class' hard earned money for our saving mother earth causes?   

Maybe I should just get one of those steel discs that farmers use to plow their fields with as a tire.  Won't have to worry about any pollution then since the steel is entirely recyclable and lasts a super long time.

Aaron

[princec]

You misunderstood... I meant the mass of the tyre.

But yes, vehicle weight is also significant. Actual road wear I believe increases with the square of the weight. Motorcycles do next to no damage to road surfaces, compared to a HGV which will wear a road surface equivalently to driving 1000 motorcycles over the same patch.

Cas

[TheRan]

Easily demonstrated by watching different vehicles drive on grass and mud. I can ride my motorcycle across a field and do little more damage than a bicycle, a car not so much. If they were going to do vehicle weight then the simple thing to do would be to factor in how many tyres there are, so cars would effectively be halved in weight relative to bikes, trucks running dualies would be 66% that of cars, lorries even less. Bikes would still benefit, as they should, because they weigh much less than half what cars do and HGVs would get a bit of a break.

[SwampNut]

LOL. Comparing grass and pavement is even crazier than the vape pen comparison. Hilarious.

[TheRan]

I agree that comparing proper electric motorcycles to vapes and low quality ebikes is stupid, I don't see how the dirt analogy is. You can't directly see the effect vehicles have on roads but they do have one over time. Dirt is softer so that effect is seen over a shorter period.

[Grauteufel]

But yes, vehicle weight is also significant. Actual road wear I believe increases with the square of the weight. Motorcycles do next to no damage to road surfaces, compared to a HGV which will wear a road surface equivalently to driving 1000 motorcycles over the same patch.

With roads the wear from a typical passenger vehicle is so negligible it isn't even factored in wearing course design for most roads.

The difference is even more insane then we intuitively think, relative damage is to the fourth power, an HGV does about 180 million times the damage of a motorcycle...... hmmm maybe there's an argument for free motorcycle rego here.

[princec]

ISTR the figures I last saw were if a motorcycle caused 1 unit of "damage", then a car was about 10x that and an HGV about 1000x. EVs are ironically causing considerably more damage as they on average weight twice as much as ICE cars.

Back to tax though: tyre tax solves most issues around fair vehicle taxation in lieu of fuel taxation in the simplest possible manner. It literally works in exactly the same way as fuel taxation, except it the tax is raised a bit earlier.

Cas

[Richard230]

One thing that politicians don't concern themselves when thinking about road (or any other) taxes (for that matter) are facts and statistics. Taxes tend to be mostly political and politicians don't mind sticking it to people who they believe will not vote for them or contribute to their next election campaign. And they don't want to make most voters mad at them if they can avoid it. It is a balancing act for politicians, one where motorcycles owners have absolutely no impact on their tax calculations, since they are such a minority - with electric motorcycle owners being in the smallest minority.   

[Specter]

But the whole electric vehicle population is growing.  Which means the road tax baked into gas prices revenue is decreasing.  Sooner or later some icehole is going to convince their politician that it is not fair that they pay road taxes and the evil electrics do not, and a new opportunity to steal peoples money will be realized, a new tax will be passed and life goes on.  The politician gets re elected then the people who cried about the 'unfairness' realize that the new tax fucks them even harder than the old ones did... and life goes on.

Aaron

[Specter]

I agree that comparing proper electric motorcycles to vapes and low quality ebikes is stupid, I.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/deadly-florida-house-fire-caused-exploding-vape-pen-firefighters-say-n872056

because only lithium batteries exploding in charging cars kill people, so we MUST outlaw them ASAP.  Vape pens are so small, too cheap, their fires can't kill anyone.  Their lithium is safe right?

besides, a quality car or bike would NEVER catch on fire while charging in someone's house

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/lithium-ion-battery-fires-electric-cars-bikes-scooters-firefighters/


Aaron

[Stonewolf]

I go away to Sweden for a week and *this* is what I come back to ...

It's important to realise that UK large electric motorcycle sales for 2023 is that came in at about half the sales of 2022 (which was a bumper year) and the volumes tend to be sufficiently low that the sales that month are dominated by whichever company dropped a shipment of bikes. 2023 was a hard year for anything premium as UK households are in a huge financial squeeze, it remains to be seen whether that will continue for 2024 but January was a pretty good month with the >35kW category registering the same number of bikes as 2022.