When you try and look for dog whistles everywhere the world becomes a useless cacophony of high pitched screeching. Road tax and vehicle tax are used pretty much interchangeably and I wouldn't read into the word choice any more than I'd read into the results of the coin toss.
*listen
You're being pedantic. Odds are your brain parsed the article from visual input not audio. It could go either way depending on which linguistic hard line you want to take.
or it could simply be that the commonly used term for Vehicle Excise Duty is "road tax" (even if it's technically incorrect)
not everything is a conspiracy
commonly used by people who disingenuously use it's etymology to imply that all 'road users' (by which they mean cyclists) rather than 'vehicle users' should pay it
I don't see anything in the article that suggests the author wants that to happen?
these hysterical responses say more about you then the people you're demonising
I dont think a carsalesman is going to feel overly demonised by being reffered to as part of the car lobby. He does know better than to conflate road and vehicle tax however.
when you can't get the name of the duty right (it's a duty, not a tax), it seems a bit rich to complain about others getting it wrong