Gizmado thinks they really have something here, attempting to paint Abbott as an Evil EV hater, forgetting that all he did was sign the law, it was passed by the Texas general assembly, with an almost unanimous vote including the Democrats
Greg Abbott Signs Law Making EV Owners Pay for Their Gas-Free Cars
EV drivers in Texas don’t pay at the pump, but will have to start paying a significant annual fee that critics are calling “punitive.”
Driving an electric vehicle in Texas is soon to become more expensive. Governor Greg Abbott signed a law (SB 505) on May 13 instituting new fees for registering and owning EVs in the state. Under the bill, electric car owners will have to pay $400 upon registering their vehicle. Then, every subsequent year, EV drivers will have to shell out an additional $200. Both of those fees are on top of the cost of the standard annual registration renewal fees, which are $50.75 each year for most passenger cars and trucks.
At least 32 states currently have special electric vehicle registration fees, according to data from the National Conference of State Legislatures. These range from $50 in places like Colorado, Hawaii, and South Dakota to $274 (starting in 2028) in a recently passed piece of Tennessee legislation. Note: Tennessee lawmakers had originally proposed a $300 fee, but lowered it in response to pushback.
Like many other states that have instituted EV fees, the reasoning behind the Lone Star State’s new law is that electric car drivers don’t buy gas. Taxes at the fuel pump are the primary way that most states, Texas included, amass funds for road construction, maintenance, and other driving-related infrastructure.
OK, they actually played fair after the headline. And this really started to hit back during the Obama years when he significantly increase the CAFE standards, which meant a lot more hybrids and vehicles that achieved pretty decent MPG, which meant lower gas tax revenues. I could find posts about states, and even the federal government, talking about increasing fees for hybrids, increasing gas taxes, and even pushing taxes for miles driven (which would, of course, mean the government tracking your vehicle), all to make up for the lost revenue.
With the push for EVs, well, that revenue has to come from somewhere to maintain roads and the infrastructure and more.
But, compared with what gas drivers contribute, Texas’s EV fees seem a little out of whack. Charging $200 per year and $400 at the outset of EV ownership places Texas’s fee schedule at the higher price end of the policies out there. In comparison, Texas’s gas tax is among the lowest in the country, at just $0.20 per gallon. Just seven states impose a lower duty on gasoline than TX. Among the 10 most populous states in the country, additional fees levied elsewhere make Texas’s gas the cheapest.
Oh, there’s the whining. Again, just about every Democrat voted for this. Regardless, people will pay more in fees for EVs. Their auto insurance will go up anywhere 10% to 25%. Repair costs will be much higher. The greater use of electricity will then cause that price to go up, including at home
Electric personal vehicles are not a perfect solution to the ongoing problem of petroleum-powered cars. Swapping every gas-guzzler for an EV still would use up an extraordinary amount of resources, that are likely to be ill-gotten. Public investment in mass transit would inarguably be a better environmental strategy. But, as long as the U.S. remains overwhelmingly car dominant and as long as most Americans lack access to adequate public transit, EV uptake remains important for lowering the nation’s carbon emissions.
And there it is: those who believe they are the Climate Cult Elites believe that they can dictate your life. And let the cat out of the bag what they really want.
So? It wouldn’t be hard to calculate the average gas tax lost every year for an EV of comparable weight to the average non-coal-powered car. I’ll bet it would be in the range quoted.
I must take exception to one statement:
Doesn’t have to mean any tracking if done intelligently. (Yeah, I know. Government and intelligence…) Anyway, the NON-intrusive way to do that is to submit your odometer reading every time you re-register your car. Subtract that from the previous amount, there’s your distance fee. If the local DMV can’t find your records, you don’t pay that year.
Of course, that would mean rescinding the gas tax.
I don’t know about other states but in PA one has to get inspected every year, That includes an odometer reading on record and available to your insurance company and the transportation tax authority. So, if you average 10,000 miles your taxes are easy to calculate. What’s the problem?
Most states use fuel taxes to pay for road building and maintenance, and so electric vehicle drivers had been using the roads for free. Everyone knew that had to change.
Lol
Teach remember there are months long waiting lists for Teslas
People have to wait in line to “have them crammed down there throats”
Tesla can’t build them fast enough
And limited new production of the new Cyber truck is due Oct 23
Also charging times are going down
New Tesla’s get 250 mile range in 18 minutes with level3 chargers
Of course that figure is always going down
Try to stay “current” on specs
We can always depend on H to show he doesn’t understand the post.
We have to pay for road and bridge construction, upgrades and maintenance in addition to mass transit support. Gas taxes (local, state and fed), user fees, tolls and state and local general revenues are used as funding sources.
Current federal gas tax is $0.184/ gal, which funds the Highway Trust Fund. State gas taxes range from $0.09 (AK) to $0.58 (PA).
Excise fees on EVs is a logical way to make up for any shortfalls resulting from decreased gasoline sales.
So what is Mr Teach’s fake-whining about? It’s a fact that mass transit in the U.S. will stay a niche solution. We waste millions of gallons of gasoline idling on our metro freeways each morning and evening rush hours all the while adding billions of pounds of CO2 to the atmosphere (1 gallon of gasoline + O2 –> 18 pounds of CO2). Our nephew is a federal attorney who lives a 1/4 mi from the local light rail (electric) station which after a 30 min ride drops him off 3 minutes from the downtown federal office building. There is no better way for the 50,000 Cardinals fans to take in 81 baseball games a year.
The objective is not to turn the U.S. into Putin’s Russia, but to cut the production of CO2, slowing the warming of the globe.
MagnumAnus denies the evidence that the Earth is warming, a result of human bein’s adding gigatons of CO2 to the atmosphere?
We assume you’re a PuppyStrangler for fun?
That might actually male sense – if the climate was as simple as leftists think it is. It’s not.
What evidence that CO2 is doing the warming?
Johnny-try to come up with evidence that we need EVs.
Jill,
Let’s look at it from the bottom up, to look for a breakdown in your understanding of global warming.
1). Do you understand that CO2 absorbs electromagnetic radiation in the infrared wavelengths?
If your answer is “yes, I understand that atmospheric CO2 absorbs infrared radiation, re-emitting it in all directions, it’s basic physics and chemistry”, we can proceed.
2a) Is atmospheric CO2 actually increasing or is the finding either an error or fraud?
2b) If your answer to 2a is “yes, CO2 is increasing, raising the concentration in the atmosphere from 260ppm in the 1800s to 420ppm now, “You may reasonably ask from what carbon stores did it originate?”
Carbon exists in a number of isotopes, 8C through 22C, although only 2, 12C and 13C are stable. 14C is a radioactive isotope of carbon that decays to 14N (nitrogen) with a half-life (t1/2): 5730 ± 30 years, serving as the basis for the radiocarbon dating technique. Fossil fuels (formed hundreds of millions years ago) have no remaining 14C. The isotopic ratio of fossil fuels, which originated from plants, is consistent with isotopic ratio in the increased amounts found in the atmosphere.
To recap this small part of the “evidence”, CO2 absorbs infrared radiation and re-emits it up, down, and to the side.
Atmospheric CO2 has increased some 50% in the past 200 years to levels unknown by humankind.
This increased CO2 came from the burning of fossil fuels.
None of this is “proof” that the Earth is warming from increased atmospheric CO2.
Next: Our homework! Is the Earth actually warming?
https://phzoe.com/2022/06/24/7-decades-of-net-solar-radiation/
All that and still no simple experiment demonstrating the hypothesis. Have an object emit LWIR, and CO2 absorbs and re-emits some of that LWIR that returns and warms the initial object. Still hasn’t been done. I wonder why? There are those that also say that it violates the 2nd law of Thermodynamics in that you have a cooler object (the atmosphere) warming a warmer object (the earth). There’s several other theories, the most notable one being increased solar radiation through a decrease in cloud cover. Over earths history, CO2 and temp don’t correlate. It was as warm, or warmer, during the MWP. It was warmer earlier in the Holocene. The problem for the alarmists is none of that can be explained with CO2, because it was lower then.
“Atmospheric CO2 increased 50%..”. Except we’re told it’s the concentration that matters, hence the ppm metric to measure it.
14% of all CO2 emitted by humans has occurred in the last 8 years or so and the globe has cooled during that time period. All these would tend to falsify the hypothesis, on top of the before mentioned failure to demonstrate it in a lab experiment
And this.. https://phzoe.com/2022/06/10/20-years-of-climate-change/
No evidence that carbon is doing a thing. And now, no correlation. Find some other method of killing our country.
We’ve noticed that conservative citizen “scientists” confuse and conflate “evidence” with scientific “proof”, do their “own research” and distrust “experts”.
I always acknowledge that I could be wrong, but I don’t believe that I am.
Frank Zappa: “One of my favorite philosophical tenets is that people will agree with you only if they already agree with you. You do not change people’s minds.”
You’re wrong. So you were actually right about something.