Hacker News Reader

Comment by bwindels | Hacker News Reader

Isn't (battery) weight a proxy for what we really care about, energy consumption per covered distance? Seems like if you'd tax the latter, manufacturers would have more options to innovate around efficiency rather than just battery weight and provide lower-taxed vehicles. Battery weight will of course still be important to get consumption down, but perhaps there are other ways as well to make cars more efficient.

One example: a thing often overlooked is the efficiency of the onboard charger, which can incur a loss of up to 32% on for example the Renault Zoe [1].

1: https://www.lachaineev.fr/ ( french )

View on HN

In the US at least, the gas tax (in concept, not really in reality) what we care about is wear on roads. Therefore a tax on gasoline was actually just a proxy for what we cared about, which was wear on roads.

Taxing battery weight is a better method in this instance, because wear is directly proportional to vehicle weight.

>wear is directly proportional to vehicle weight.

Road wear is proportional to the fourth power of axle weight:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_power_law

>Taxing battery weight is an indirect way to get at the underlying resource consumption in battery manufacturing and production.

Tax (curb - battery) weight then? So we can afford the 1000km vehicles we all say we need, while penalizing the heaviest and most inefficient EVs.

If the idea is to replace gas taxes as a means of funding roads then the tax should be based on a combination of damage done by the vehicle (which is basically a tax on weight) and some efficiency multiplier. I’ve seen it mentioned in the past that governments can just check your odometer reading on a yearly basis and charge a tax on that but it’s probably just easier to tax the electricity at the point of charge (specifically for charging purposes).

Ideally this would encourage lighter vehicles to cut down on the initial “weight” tax as well as increase efficiency of the vehicle overall (more miles per kilowatt hour).

There’s obviously going to be a lot of headaches for farm use vehicles and people generating their own power and paying a tax on it but how else do you pay for roads and incentivize people to stop driving gigantic vehicles?

Pretty much the only vehicles that matter from an infrastructure wear and tear perspective are the heaviest traffic (which on every road that isn't a private driveway means commercial trucks).

If you want to tax that just tax based on the max GVW.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com