States should be applying special taxes to BEV registrations due to increased weight that causes additional wear on asphalt. My state tacks on registration fee.
That comes to roughly $214 — the registration fee electric vehicle owners have to pay every year. EV owners don’t have to pay federal gas taxes.
The gasoline taxes are essentially a consumption tax on miles driven. So if we are going to take this approach, lets go further and tax based on actual miles driven.
And maybe add a tax for vehicles with extra passenger seating room. At 180lbs a seat, 6 seats can carry more than the weight difference between an ICE car and a BEV.
Maybe this article will be helpful for understanding arguments for the efficiency of EVs vs gassers. It was eye opening for me. Now if the prices for purchasing and insuring EVs would just come down. I’m happy to pay my share of road use tax.
The Salton Sea in California is poised to be a hotspot for lithium extraction.
I get a bunch of information from https://cleantechnica.com/
Lots of interesting articles there. But for sure, it’s pro-BEV and green energy. For my dollar, I’m betting on these topics to lessen the climate crisis we’re seeing all around us.
If you look at the source of the article from CleanTechnica, it also shows that the growth is flattening after a meteoric rise. I think the demand is going to plateau until another breakthrough in battery technology comes to production cars. I’m waiting for the “next generation” EVs before I replace my only car with one.
Interesting article… but it is indicative of just 2021 model cars. And during that time yearly sales of EVs more than doubled while ICE car yearly sales decreased.
From the article: “The 2024 U.S. Vehicle Dependability Study is based on responses from 30,595 original owners of 2021 model-year vehicles after three years of ownership. The study was fielded from August through November 2023.”
It’s worth noting that this data has some limitations. We only have information regarding tires and infotainment systems for this story. J.D. Power hasn’t said much about the reliability of batteries, drivetrain, and range and performance in its report.
So…the biggest issue I read about was tire wear…followed by some intermittent issues with the infotainment systems. Is that what we are talking about? What about anything mechanical ?
EV’s will reach their tipping point when people finally start discussing fit and finish issues with Tesla’s that they derided American automakers for back in the 70’s
I doubt that I will have an EV as I may be driving my last vehicle. I need 4x4’s anyway and won’t be buying anything new.
Besides, if I did have to bite the bullet, it would have to be a gas/EV of some sort for the same reasons that my electric emergency generator is gas/propane. The is too much chance thatone of the other is not available at any given time, the same with electric charging or gasoline for the vehicle.
Here one of the longest drives is 100 miles (2 hours 25 minutes drive time) and there are two stations along the drive. One is available 9-5 and the other says M-F during school hours. As a resident, I would be more mindful of the need to be fully gassed or fully charged for a drive of 100 miles. There are no bypasses and a tree down across the road or an accident can block the road for many, many hours. The replacement power poles take hours to be delivered and the road would be blocked. Other issues which are not as common, lava flowing across the road or an earthquake causing a crack in the roadway; each requiring backtracking.
Yesterday, a drunk driver caused a multi-car accident and closed the highway for half the day. Luckily there was one way around. Many other places have no alternative. It is just life in rural areas.
Not so long ago, our Propane distributor employees went on strike. Many people here rely upon propane for cooking, electricity, hot water and cooking as many live off-grid. We also only have 1 gasoline refinery in the state.
Granted, in most other locations in the U.S. other than very rural areas, these are not your problems. “Your mileage may differ” as they say.
My point is that boiling a lobster is done a little at a time, so that the animal never notices the change in temperature. I believe that is happening to Earth! A small increase in solar radiation each year, applied over the past 4.6 billion years has added up to higher average temperatures in many equatorial regions, and it is moving north and south each year. See the attached graph.
The temperature shown is the temperature of the surface of the Sun, which remains nearly constant. However, the solar surface nuclear fusion area increases each year, resulting in a huge amount of additional energy (indicated by the Luminosity measurement) directed at Earth. This extra heat is growing at an exponential rate, getting larger at a larger rate each year.
If your point is that we humans are facing some kind of real threat due to increased exposure to changes in solar radiation, your point has serious flaws. The graph you posted to illustrate your point is a good example of that fact.
The graph covers a time span of 12,000,000,000 years. Our earth has been around for approx. 4,500,000,000 years and humans have walked the earth for 6,000,000 years. Based on the graph’s timeline, just the width of the of the vertical line of the pointer indicating the “Now” spot in the timeline on your graph covers more time (7 million years) than humans have walked the earth. If we consider that people create about three generations in a hundred years, the place where the green, blue and red lines converge covers a timespan of over 420,000 generations of humans
You are making a point that is not relevant to real life as we will experience it over the next couple of million years. The changes you refer to are so miniscule as to be insignificant.
BTW: I have boiled lots of marine arthropods, you get the pot of water boiling first, THEN you drop 'em in it. It would be cruel to do otherwise.
How do you predict what will happen in the next 20 years, much less the next 7 million? Nothing is changing yet? Everything will go along as it has up until now? That is the political and educational line we have been handed for generations. I am skeptical.
More energy going into a heat sink year after year logically will eventually cause some changes. The question is not if, but when will it get too hot to live here? Yes, it will probably be many millions of years before the Earth burns, but I think it will get pretty darned steamy a very long time before that. Already I think back 75 years to childhood days when I could play outside all day in July and not even work up a sweat. Now I walk out in the sun for 15 minutes and I feel like my skin is on fire. Back then, 100-degree days were rare in Alabama. Now we have them all the time, and last summer there were several 110-degree days. That seems to be a change. I know that is not scientific, but sometimes seat-of-the pants knowledge trumps all the learned scientific studies that are only parroting the official line. Are we risking the future of humanity by ignoring this threat?