Luxury road tax rates for electric vehicles after April 2025

Iceweasel

Car_54 said:

Iceweasel said:

I think it would be a good idea to have a tax on all vehicles where 100% of the money raised would be used to build and repair the roads.
We could call it 'Highway Tax'.
We haven't had such a tax since Road Tax was abolished around1937 I think.
Fuel Duty should go towards roads too.
EV charging points should have a tax on the electricity supplied to go towards roads too.

So, you're happy for all taxes on car use to go on roads, and reduce the amount going to the NHS, education, defence, etc? 

How would you propose making up the deficit?

No political debates on MSE!

Herzlos

Car_54 said:

Herzlos said:

born_again said:

Herzlos said:

They generally don't make retroactive changes, so until the band prices go up enough there will be a point where a diesel car may pay less VED than an EV. The EV will still be paying less tax overall though via fuel duty and VAT.

In this case they have. As older EV's, & my understanding is that all other ICE will also pay the same base rate of VED, which as a EV driver is a fair outcome to all.

Yeah they are essentially removing the <100g/km bands, so EV's before 2017 will got £20/year and 2017 onwards will to go to £190/year. I certainly don't think that'll be enough to put off EV buyers since as you said you'd still saving double that in fuel alone.

It certainly seems pretty fair, as EV's still use the roads even without the emissions.

EVs do indeed use the roads, but VED has absolutely nothing to do with road use.

Not directly, but it's a tax to use a car on a road, so any car using the road should be paying something.

(You can keep and use a car without paying tax if it's not on a public road).

Ganga

Would it not be better if every vehicle was charged say £150 a year VED ,after all they all wear the road away.
I will put on my tin hat and await the replies  

Ectophile

Ganga said:

Would it not be better if every vehicle was charged say £150 a year VED ,after all they all wear the road away.
I will put on my tin hat and await the replies  

So a 38 ton truck should pay the same as a moped?

Goudy

Ganga said:

Would it not be better if every vehicle was charged say £150 a year VED ,after all they all wear the road away.
I will put on my tin hat and await the replies  

Better, perhaps.
Will it happen, not a chance.

Whatever happens will be sold to us all as one thing but the up shot will be all vehicles will be raising the government the same sort of revenue or more, not less.

From a revenue point of view, EVs aren't pulling in enough compared to petrol and diesel, mainly due to fuel duty. 
By the end of the year it's expected 1.2 million will be on our roads and it's not like they will be less in future, they will be more, a lot more 

Eventually all vehicles won't be petrol or diesel, so no fuel duty will flow in under the current setup.
So at some point they'll all have to working out how to raise the same sort of revenue.

It looks like the government has started to work out the figures already, hence the introduction of VED, but that certainly isn't the end of it.
As time moves on and there are less and less fuel duty payers, so the treasury will be looking at other ways to fill the coffers that used to be filled with fuel duty.

If that way is from road users, that's only going to mean from EV drivers as that's all there will be.

Herzlos

Ectophile said:

Ganga said:

Would it not be better if every vehicle was charged say £150 a year VED ,after all they all wear the road away.
I will put on my tin hat and await the replies  

So a 38 ton truck should pay the same as a moped?

You could base the tax on the gross vehicle weight, that'd cut down on people driving enormous SUV's the 500 yards to school and back.

10p/year/kilo would mean a 1500kg hatchback would be your £150/year VED and an Audi Q8 would be £318.

You'd probably need to make it train weight for commercial vehicles or a rigid truck would be more expensive than a tractor+trailer. I'd thought you could to train weight / number of axles but since the trailer can change and isn't registered/taxed in it's right that'd be impossible.

It also doesn't take into account that damage isn't squared* and not linear. a 3000kg car will do 4x more damage to the road than a 1500kg car.

*I think it's squared. it's certainly more than linear.

Car_54

Herzlos said:

Ectophile said:

Ganga said:

Would it not be better if every vehicle was charged say £150 a year VED ,after all they all wear the road away.
I will put on my tin hat and await the replies  

So a 38 ton truck should pay the same as a moped?

You could base the tax on the gross vehicle weight, that'd cut down on people driving enormous SUV's the 500 yards to school and back.

10p/year/kilo would mean a 1500kg hatchback would be your £150/year VED and an Audi Q8 would be £318.

You'd probably need to make it train weight for commercial vehicles or a rigid truck would be more expensive than a tractor+trailer. I'd thought you could to train weight / number of axles but since the trailer can change and isn't registered/taxed in it's right that'd be impossible.

It also doesn't take into account that damage isn't squared* and not linear. a 3000kg car will do 4x more damage to the road than a 1500kg car.

*I think it's squared. it's certainly more than linear.

It’s the fourth power, so double the (axle) weight does 16 times the damage. A truck with 10 ton axle weight causes 10,000 times as much wear as a one ton car. It follows that cars make a negligible contribution to wear on the roads compared to GVs and buses.

Goudy

By the looks of it, it's a balancing up exercise at least in the short term.

As we know there's a massive offset in tax revenue between a ICE and EV's and the government have already started to address that with the new VED rates for EVs plus including the supplemental tax on all expensive EV's.

Once that's done, they'll need a plan to replace the income from all that fuel duty which will continue to reduce year on year.

When you think about it, fuel duty is a by mile/usage tax based and is roughly based on weight/size of vehicle.
The more fuel you use because you drive more or have a heavy vehicle or both, the more tax in the form of fuel duty you pay.
It's basically road pricing already.

They'll keep the VED system as it covers all vehicles "on the road" rather than just vehicles used on the road per trip, then once they work out a reliable way to introduce a different system based on use, that's what they'll do.

It looks likely it will be some other form of road pricing but there are problems with various schemes that are being put forward at the moment.

A camera system is just too expensive and too intrusive.

MOT mileage has problems with resale between MOT's, plus they aren't needed for the first three years.

A tracking system will have to use GPS and GSM signals which can be blocked for less than a tenner.

Putting fuel duty on electricity for road use, how that would work also has it's problems.

Whatever it is, I can't see it being that far off as it'll have to be in place well before EVs out sell ICE's and yes it's going to seem unfair to some, particularly those used to the current set up for EV's.

For those down the line a little, it's just going to seem "like for like", they'll be paying the same sort of revenue as they did on their ICE.

Everyone with an EV now will just have to accept they've had a healthy tax break as an incentive to change early.
Something others in future just aren't going to get.

Grumpy_chap

Goudy said:

By the looks of it, it's a balancing up exercise at least in the short term.

Which is fair enough but rather odd that the "balancing up" did not also cover older ICE cars, some of which will continue to benefit from the £zero and £30 rates.

Iceweasel

And for the Britidh trucks carrying goods to mainland Europe?
And UK holidaymakers who drive thousands of miles on holiday in the EU and beyond?