Mileage tax

[Eyesa Horg]

2 minutes ago, John Kloehr said:

The facts are different, the analogies still apply to fundamental technological change and unexpected consequences.

 

One of the factors holding back economical nuclear power is actually lack of demand. This may be one of the drivers behind reducing the use of natural gas for heat and conversion from gasoline to electric vehicles. The economics show these additional demands would make it possible to scale nuclear power economically.

 

Scaled nuclear power shows promise to be much less expensive than current energy sources, but not at all the "too cheap to meter" promise from decades ago.

 

Managing any transition is fraught with risk, particularly since some transitions happen without planning. Cell service was never expected to have near universal adoption. As a result, phone lines were still being strung that would never be used. And they were not good enough to carry Internet traffic. A pretty big government bailout saved them. Well, not the wires so much as the binds financing them. The new phone lines would never bring in enough revenue to pay off the bonds, and those bonds were a big part of managed retirement funds.

 

Now take the analogy of an investment not paying off. Assume a gas station needs to operate for 20 years to break even (I just guessed at the number). Assume the conversion to EVs is planned to happen so fast, the gas station will go broke in 10 years. Only a fool would build that gas station.

 

Well, one common prediction is that half of all cars sold in the US will be electric around 2040. The average life of a car is currently 12 years. By 2050, we will not need at least half of the gas stations we currently have.

 

And so slowly having circled back to the topic (mileage tax), in about 30 years the amount of road tax collected from gasoline sales will be gone. A per-kilowatt-hour tax on electricity going into cars is a logical replacement. A flat annual fee is not logical.

 

No system will be completely fair to everyone. I pay more tax per mile than the owner of an econobox.

 

 

I pay about double per mile. Those driving EVs should pay some reasonably fair share to share the road with me.

But your car is so, so much cooler!

[John Kloehr]

5 minutes ago, Eyesa Horg said:

But your car is so, so much cooler!

A gift to myself while I can still enjoy it.

[Alpo]

"When I get old, I shall drive purple"

[watab kid]

7 hours ago, Sgt. C.J. Sabre, SASS #46770 said:

While at the same time, not only refusing to build more electricity producing infrastructure, but asking owners of said EVs NOT to charge their cars during certain times because there isn't enough infrastructure to support their doing so.

aint that the truth - pushing us to all electric everything and shutting our power plants down here locally , makes no sense at all , 

[Matthew Duncan]

On 6/26/2023 at 12:39 PM, Sgt. C.J. Sabre, SASS #46770 said:

Now you just STOP making sense here. The government will have NONE of that!

Corrrct.  Applying logic for resolution isn’t a government strong point 

[Sgt. C.J. Sabre, SASS #46770]

13 minutes ago, watab kid said:

aint that the truth - pushing us to all electric everything and shutting our power plants down here locally , makes no sense at all , 

It's not about sense, it's about money, control, and power, or in a word, government.

[Subdeacon Joe]

8 hours ago, John Kloehr said:

Gasoline was originally a waste product from making kerosene. Kerosene was the main fuel for lighting at the time.

 

Those who bought cars would get gasoline from feed and hardware stores (and some pharmacies) and store it at home. This was "reasonable" and modeled the infrastructure for feeding horses (and getting kerosene).

 

As cars became more popular, there were significant infrastructure stresses. Gasoline was far more volatile than hay, what was a waste product became a product in demand, building tanker trucks to deliver gasoline to homes lagged behind demand.

 

The first gas station showed up around 1910 and a completely new infrastructure had to be built around delivering fuel to more places. This then led to not storing fuel at homes or needing to take extra fuel on long trips.

 

At the same time, another trend was happening. Used horses dropped in value for a while, then suddenly they went up in value! They were needed to make hide glue for the furniture industry. But then the supply of dead (or even living but old) horses started to dry up.

 

Glue became so expensive, the industry response was to develop synthetic adhesives. These became cheaper than hide glue and the price of horses plummeted. The price of carcasses went so low that those still using horses would leave them where they fell in the road; removal became a cost to government.

 

Just some background trivia, food for thought when thinking about the change to EVs. We do have an infrastructure which delivers electricity to homes. But it is not at the scale needed to charge vehicles. The upgrade has to replace almost all of the current gasoline infrastructure in the developed world. And the replacement has to happen fast enough to meet demand at the same time slow enough to not create shortages or other impacts on the economy.

 

Our gasoline-powered vehicles today are like the horses from a century ago. There is a lot of supply chain in building them, maintaining them, and in disposing of (recycling) them.

 

 

 

Very well said.

 

I wonder how many fires there were from poorly stored gasoline in the early days.