The hell you say! Let’s consider that a Kia Niro hybrid starts at $24690. The EV version? $39090. That’s not an insignificant chunk of change. The VW ID4 starts at $39995. The Tiguan, about the same size, starts at $2545. Oh, and then there’s this little tidbit from Jolly Old England
Don’t kid yourself: electric cars won’t save you money
Does anyone really believe that owning an electric car will end up saving them money? If you have fallen for the claims that lower running costs will more than make up for the higher purchase price of an electric car then you haven’t spotted something rather large that is barrelling down the middle of the road straight towards you: road pricing.
It would be easy to write off today’s report by the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change — which calls for road-pricing — as the work of a powerless and frustrated man trying to re-live his glory days as Prime Minister. Blair, you might just remember, attempted to lumber road-pricing upon us in the dying days of his premiership but was beaten back by public opposition. But he has a point. The switch to electric cars is going to cost the Treasury so much — £30 billion a year or the equivalent of six pence on income tax by 2040 according to Blair’s institute – that it is simply going to have to try to recoup that cost somehow. If it isn’t in the form of jacking up taxes on electricity – a political impossibility given that the government will be simultaneously trying to persuade us to dump our gas boilers for heat pumps – it is likely to come in the form of charging us for every mile we drive on the roads.
Yes, owners of electric cars currently pay less for their energy than do drivers of petrol and diesel cars, but it is not a fair comparison because it ignores the tax differential. For every pound you spend on petrol or diesel, around 60 pence goes to the Exchequer in tax. Charge your electric vehicle at home, on the other hand, and you pay just five percent VAT. Take into account that pure electric vehicles pay zero Vehicle Excise Duty (VED) and, according to the calculations by Blair’s institute, electric vehicle-owners pay just two percent of the motoring taxes paid by drivers of petrol and diesel cars.
Just wait, then, until the government tries to make up its losses. You won’t be so impressed with your electric vehicle then, not when the whole of Britain is peppered with London congestion charge-style levies. It is a precondition of road pricing schemes that all vehicles are monitored constantly. We will have to be followed around, either through an enhanced network of number plate recognition cameras or by GPS devices fixed in our cars. Every journey we make will logged and the data stored. Given how DVLA already co-operates with private parking companies by flogging them our home addresses, don’t be surprised if it assumes the right to start selling our mobility data to all kinds of marketing organisations who can then target us with ads tailored to which places we frequent.
Oh, but that’s England. They wouldn’t do something like that here, right? In fact, this has already been discussed as Surrender Joe and Gavin Newsome have pushed to replace all fossil fueled vehicles, even regular hybrids, with EVs. Think back to when Obama was raising the CAFE standards, and gas tax revenue was dropping (people like better fuel economy, in most cases), so they were talking about raising the gas taxes, at both the state and federal levels. And implementing “road pricing”, meaning charging you for how many miles you drove. Hybrid owners were incensed. And this would have been on top of a gas tax.
But, at least it would have been simple, simply charging for miles driving. The Blair Institute goes further
It is suggested motorists could be charged a flat rate for every mile they travel, with each driver allowed a number of free miles per year.
But it warns that such a system would be unlikely to have much of an impact on congestion.
Another suggestion is to bring charges based on geography similar to London’s congestion zone or to apply a sliding scale of cost based on how long each journey takes.
The final proposal is to bring in a dynamic road user charging system, similar to one in Singapore, where higher costs are applied to the most congested routes at the busiest times of day.
So, figuring out ways to charge people forced into EVs they cannot afford no matter the situation. Think the Modern Socialists/Warmists in the U.S. aren’t paying attention?
And then there’s the notion of tracking you, because you can bet that what happens is not a simple sending of how many miles you drive to the government.