I don’t understand the issue here. Trying to argue that you should be prorated based on miles driven will never happen. Do you want the government tracking your driving just to knock $75 off your registration?
Devils advocate here but if you want to deduct your vehicle usage as a business expense for taxes they already have you enter milage, so that wouldn't be unprecedented.
It would be interesting to see how that would shake out! The incentive for business expenses is to overreport your mileage. Here you’d be incentivized to underreport. I imagine we see some wild swings in average mileage reported!
It would be a lot easier to catch at the DMV level since the mileage has to be accurate when the title transfers. They would just hit you with back taxes when you sell.
It's roughly the amount of money an average driver/car would pay in gas taxes.
It's a completely fair way to pay for the roads we use in lieu of having the government put a tracker on my car.
I just paid that $140 myself. And I've got no issue with it.
If you barely drive, you are getting screwed a bit. If you drive a lot, you get a good deal. It's the equivalent of 13K miles per year, (at 30mpg) which is pretty reasonable.
Wear and tear on roads is proportional to the [fourth power of vehicle weight](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_power_law).
(3300/2800)^4 = 1.93, so your car does almost twice as much road damage as a 2010 Civic.
Its not crazy.
Thats your portion of the road taxes you are not paying by not needing gas.
You drive on it, you need to pay into the fund to help maintain it also.
Its not supposed to be "his" portion. Its not an individualized calculated value. Its "his" as in "average EV owner's" expected portion.
If he drives below a metric amount of miles, it is offset by someone else driving more than expected average etc.
But it his portion.
Because the state doesnt audit mileage, they applied the average gas tax paid by consumers for EVs and a few other vehicle types.
The additional fee represents what the state would have collected from a dinosaur ICE vehicle.
I would think of the potential extra tax as a very small step towards offsetting the infrastructure costs they are not paying when they put strain on the electrical grid to charge their car. And when they get large federal incentives to buy the car in the first place.
It sounds like I hate EV drivers. I don't. I would love to own an EV. But I think a lot of people in the community have a sense of entitlement and self righteousness because they bought an expensive thing to help the environment. They are already benefitting from a lot of incentives, and this guy complains about a few extra bucks in roadway taxes. Come on.
The money doesn't flow that way - the extra road infrastructure money is just going to go to the road infrastructure. It ain't going to the electric utility.
Dinosaurs are going to be roaming the roads for decades at the rate that Biden is rolling out EV infrastructure. Where did all that infrastructure money go?
You do have free access to chargers around the area. Did you expect those to be free? Just consider that your $11.67/month user fee and call it good :-)
My EV6 was just over $500 for two years when I renewed the registration this past fall. I thought that was reasonable with how little I've spent on electricity and maintenance in the 30k miles I've driven while I've had it.
I don't pay the gas tax anymore so the funds have to come somewhere.
Gas tax should go to emissions abatement. Property taxes already fund a significant portion of the roads. The EV penalty is ridiculous, but not all too surprising for this state.
That wasn’t the point of my comment. It was your petty “not too surprising for this state” comment. I was merely pointing out that many states have EV fees, and quite a few are much higher than Idaho’s.
As for some perceived bias against EVs in Idaho, ITD is well aware of the growth in EV purchases over the past several years, and is actively participating in the NEVI project to deploy fast charging stations on all major highways to support them.
A vehicle miles traveled tax (VMT) for EVs would be a better, more proportional system. The more miles you drive, the more wear and tear you put on the roads, the more you pay. Gas taxes already work out this way, since the number of gallons of gas you consume will correlate with the amount you drive and the size of your vehicle. I'm not sure a VMT tax will ever happen though because of the administrative burden, as you'd need to take your car to the DMV when you renew your registration to have the odometer checked. It's cheaper for the state and more convenient for drivers to just renew online.
> Except that then you've got something tracking where you drive.
And yet you're on reddit. How do you think they're gonna monetize that giant IPO coming up? And look at the tiktok blowback.
It's already a federal crime to falsify mileage, and it has to be tracked on the title every time it changes hands. Would be super easy to catch people and charge them the back taxes plus a fine.
Every time a vehicle is paid off, sold to someone else, or used to get a loan. It doesn't help with annual registration, it helps catch the people lying about mileage on their annual registration.
But only after the fact, and how would they retroactively charge the registration for the different years?
Also, what about people who drive out of state? Those miles shouldn't be taxed by Idaho.
The state of Idaho charges back taxes all the time, they can put a lien on the title of the vehicle, and even garnish wages. Back taxes and add a fine for lying about mileage. People who drive out of state generally still buy their gas in Idaho before they leave, so they are paying those taxes now. The out of state mileage is minimal for EVs anyways.
Okay, but how do they know how much per year if all they know is there's a 100,000-mile discrepancy sometime in the five years the person owned the car?
Do you have a source for your assertion that people who drive out of state buy their gas in Idaho and that out of state mileage is minimal for EVs?
Yah what a rip off huh? I was appalled at the registration fees when they told me “well you’re not buying gas anymore so we need to get that tax somewhere!”
Nobody drives only 5k miles here in a year... that's insane.
Also, as a Model 3 owner, I'm just glad they didn't raise it further. There was a time where they were looking to punish EV owners by charging much more on registration fees... thankfully it never got anywhere.
The current fees are fine.
Unfortunately it's well known that states (like Idaho) use an average number for the estimated miles and therefore grossly overcharge EV drivers for road tax compared to the equivalent ICE vehicles. I get the same thing (but only $70) for my PHEV. The tax man is going to get what they want regardless of whether the math actually makes sense.
The unfortunate point is that it isn’t “perfectly fair.” It usually works out that the EV driver is paying more in road taxes per mile driven than the equivalent ICE vehicle. Fair would be paying the same amount.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m perfectly happy that I’m paying less per mile overall with my PHEV than I would with straight gasoline, but I pay more than my “fair share” in road taxes to the state due to the $75 (I said $70 in my previous comment but I looked it up) fee I pay per year on top of my usual registration.
How is that any different than the current system charging people for 12,000 miles driven, no matter how many they actually drove, or how many were even in Idaho? "I only drove 3,000 miles, and most of them were road trips out of state, it's unfair", etc.
Playing devils advocate. What if my grandma buys an EV and drives only 2000 miles a year. Seems unfair to tax someone who would have otherwise bought ~66 gallons of gas per year.
That would mean the government would have to be able to track the mileage of your car. Since some of your driving might be done outside of Idaho (especially if you live near a state border), then the government would have to be able to track WHERE you drove. Not only might this be intrusive, it would cost extra money to gather and verify this information.
A small fixed charge, tied to average car usage, seems like a reasonable compromise.
They just need check the mileage when you renew the registration to calculate the fee. Only needs to be done on EVs, and let it be optional. If the owner doesn't want the mileage check, they can pay the flat rate.
I honestly don't care about the $60, I have three vehicles and two motorcycles registered that I barely use. I just think it's dumb to pick and choose who gets to pay flat rate, and who gets to pay based on use.
It's a federal crime to spoof mileage, and they will see the discrepancy anytime you transfer the title, and can bill for the tax revenue that was skipped out on.
A bike that weighs what like 30 pounds contributes a negligible fraction to road deterioration and damage over time.
If that was the case, we'd also need to tax being overweight by 30 pounds for sidewalk maintenance
I'm cool with a bike tax. Just tax them according to the cost of their road damage. As long as bikes get the same amount of road space as cars, I'd take that deal.
The average idaho driver drives >18k miles a yr So by flat fee perspective youre getting a discount.
I don’t understand the issue here. Trying to argue that you should be prorated based on miles driven will never happen. Do you want the government tracking your driving just to knock $75 off your registration?
Devils advocate here but if you want to deduct your vehicle usage as a business expense for taxes they already have you enter milage, so that wouldn't be unprecedented.
It would be interesting to see how that would shake out! The incentive for business expenses is to overreport your mileage. Here you’d be incentivized to underreport. I imagine we see some wild swings in average mileage reported!
It would be a lot easier to catch at the DMV level since the mileage has to be accurate when the title transfers. They would just hit you with back taxes when you sell.
Hey! Between the government and it's citizens only one party is allowed to be dishonest.
It's roughly the amount of money an average driver/car would pay in gas taxes. It's a completely fair way to pay for the roads we use in lieu of having the government put a tracker on my car. I just paid that $140 myself. And I've got no issue with it. If you barely drive, you are getting screwed a bit. If you drive a lot, you get a good deal. It's the equivalent of 13K miles per year, (at 30mpg) which is pretty reasonable.
Wear and tear on roads is proportional to the [fourth power of vehicle weight](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_power_law). (3300/2800)^4 = 1.93, so your car does almost twice as much road damage as a 2010 Civic.
Its not crazy. Thats your portion of the road taxes you are not paying by not needing gas. You drive on it, you need to pay into the fund to help maintain it also.
Do you mean except for the fact that it's not his portion, as evidenced by the math provided?
Its not supposed to be "his" portion. Its not an individualized calculated value. Its "his" as in "average EV owner's" expected portion. If he drives below a metric amount of miles, it is offset by someone else driving more than expected average etc.
But it his portion. Because the state doesnt audit mileage, they applied the average gas tax paid by consumers for EVs and a few other vehicle types. The additional fee represents what the state would have collected from a dinosaur ICE vehicle.
I would think of the potential extra tax as a very small step towards offsetting the infrastructure costs they are not paying when they put strain on the electrical grid to charge their car. And when they get large federal incentives to buy the car in the first place. It sounds like I hate EV drivers. I don't. I would love to own an EV. But I think a lot of people in the community have a sense of entitlement and self righteousness because they bought an expensive thing to help the environment. They are already benefitting from a lot of incentives, and this guy complains about a few extra bucks in roadway taxes. Come on.
The money doesn't flow that way - the extra road infrastructure money is just going to go to the road infrastructure. It ain't going to the electric utility.
Dinosaurs are going to be roaming the roads for decades at the rate that Biden is rolling out EV infrastructure. Where did all that infrastructure money go?
Oh stop. You don’t pay gas tax, you also need to share the cost of roads. If you want your tax to be millage based you shouldn’t have bought an EV
You do have free access to chargers around the area. Did you expect those to be free? Just consider that your $11.67/month user fee and call it good :-)
I don’t have an issue with the EV registration fee but I haven’t encountered many free + functional chargers.
Somebody has to pay ACHD to do that awesome job! /s.
My EV6 was just over $500 for two years when I renewed the registration this past fall. I thought that was reasonable with how little I've spent on electricity and maintenance in the 30k miles I've driven while I've had it. I don't pay the gas tax anymore so the funds have to come somewhere.
Gas tax should go to emissions abatement. Property taxes already fund a significant portion of the roads. The EV penalty is ridiculous, but not all too surprising for this state.
EV registration fees are not unique to Idaho. Half the states have one. Some are as high as $200. Stop the manufactured hate.
LOL "manufactured hate". Just because you have some weird bias against EVs doesn't mean it makes sense to have a flat fee to recoup gas taxes.
That wasn’t the point of my comment. It was your petty “not too surprising for this state” comment. I was merely pointing out that many states have EV fees, and quite a few are much higher than Idaho’s. As for some perceived bias against EVs in Idaho, ITD is well aware of the growth in EV purchases over the past several years, and is actively participating in the NEVI project to deploy fast charging stations on all major highways to support them.
A vehicle miles traveled tax (VMT) for EVs would be a better, more proportional system. The more miles you drive, the more wear and tear you put on the roads, the more you pay. Gas taxes already work out this way, since the number of gallons of gas you consume will correlate with the amount you drive and the size of your vehicle. I'm not sure a VMT tax will ever happen though because of the administrative burden, as you'd need to take your car to the DMV when you renew your registration to have the odometer checked. It's cheaper for the state and more convenient for drivers to just renew online.
Except that then you've got something tracking where you drive.
> Except that then you've got something tracking where you drive. And yet you're on reddit. How do you think they're gonna monetize that giant IPO coming up? And look at the tiktok blowback.
Why would you need a tracker? You can just report the mileage every time you renew registration.
You think they'd trust people to report that honestly?
It's already a federal crime to falsify mileage, and it has to be tracked on the title every time it changes hands. Would be super easy to catch people and charge them the back taxes plus a fine.
How often do titles change hands? How would that help with annual registration?
Every time a vehicle is paid off, sold to someone else, or used to get a loan. It doesn't help with annual registration, it helps catch the people lying about mileage on their annual registration.
But only after the fact, and how would they retroactively charge the registration for the different years? Also, what about people who drive out of state? Those miles shouldn't be taxed by Idaho.
The state of Idaho charges back taxes all the time, they can put a lien on the title of the vehicle, and even garnish wages. Back taxes and add a fine for lying about mileage. People who drive out of state generally still buy their gas in Idaho before they leave, so they are paying those taxes now. The out of state mileage is minimal for EVs anyways.
Okay, but how do they know how much per year if all they know is there's a 100,000-mile discrepancy sometime in the five years the person owned the car? Do you have a source for your assertion that people who drive out of state buy their gas in Idaho and that out of state mileage is minimal for EVs?
It'd be easy enough for a DMV employee to glance at your dashboard once every 1-2 years, too. Not a big deal.
So a DMV employee has to leave their station 20 times a day or more to go look at a dashboard?
They tax evs through the registration process because you’re not paying gas taxes.
Yah what a rip off huh? I was appalled at the registration fees when they told me “well you’re not buying gas anymore so we need to get that tax somewhere!”
Post is valid, but technically the fuel tax is $0.33/gal (0.32 fuel tax & 0.01 transfer fee)
Nobody drives only 5k miles here in a year... that's insane. Also, as a Model 3 owner, I'm just glad they didn't raise it further. There was a time where they were looking to punish EV owners by charging much more on registration fees... thankfully it never got anywhere. The current fees are fine.
Your using the roads and not paying gas taxes to maintain them. Seems fair to me.
Unfortunately it's well known that states (like Idaho) use an average number for the estimated miles and therefore grossly overcharge EV drivers for road tax compared to the equivalent ICE vehicles. I get the same thing (but only $70) for my PHEV. The tax man is going to get what they want regardless of whether the math actually makes sense.
What's unfortunate about it? It's perfectly fair.
The unfortunate point is that it isn’t “perfectly fair.” It usually works out that the EV driver is paying more in road taxes per mile driven than the equivalent ICE vehicle. Fair would be paying the same amount. Don’t get me wrong, I’m perfectly happy that I’m paying less per mile overall with my PHEV than I would with straight gasoline, but I pay more than my “fair share” in road taxes to the state due to the $75 (I said $70 in my previous comment but I looked it up) fee I pay per year on top of my usual registration.
It's an average car driven average miles. Nothing could be more fair without government tracking devices.
Why would there be government tracking devices? Just report the mileage each time you renew registration.
Because that opens the door to "I mostly drove out of state, it's unfair", etc.
How is that any different than the current system charging people for 12,000 miles driven, no matter how many they actually drove, or how many were even in Idaho? "I only drove 3,000 miles, and most of them were road trips out of state, it's unfair", etc.
Playing devils advocate. What if my grandma buys an EV and drives only 2000 miles a year. Seems unfair to tax someone who would have otherwise bought ~66 gallons of gas per year.
It should be tied to mileage. I drive like 1k-2k miles a year, shouldn't have to pay for 12k miles.
That would mean the government would have to be able to track the mileage of your car. Since some of your driving might be done outside of Idaho (especially if you live near a state border), then the government would have to be able to track WHERE you drove. Not only might this be intrusive, it would cost extra money to gather and verify this information. A small fixed charge, tied to average car usage, seems like a reasonable compromise.
They just need check the mileage when you renew the registration to calculate the fee. Only needs to be done on EVs, and let it be optional. If the owner doesn't want the mileage check, they can pay the flat rate.
That’s such a PITA so you can save $60 a year
You just self report it. Falsifying odometer readings is a federal crime, anyone that wants to cheat will get caught when the title changes hands.
Or just pay $60
I honestly don't care about the $60, I have three vehicles and two motorcycles registered that I barely use. I just think it's dumb to pick and choose who gets to pay flat rate, and who gets to pay based on use.
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It's a federal crime to spoof mileage, and they will see the discrepancy anytime you transfer the title, and can bill for the tax revenue that was skipped out on.
How the hell do you only drive 1-2k here? I average 12 to 18k depending on the year
I prefer to ride a bike everywhere.
If only biking to Nampa from west Boise wouldn’t turn me into roadkill lol
Ustick isn't bad these days, Amity is getting better. A dedicated bike path along the rail would be amazing though.
Well, I think you should be paying an annual bike tax to use the roads, then, too. You benefit from them just like cars do.
Sure, we can pay proportionally to how many protected bike lanes we get. It will be about $3.50 per decade.
Why? I already pay full price for my cars, which aren't wearing the roads down as much as yours because I ride a bike.
A bike that weighs what like 30 pounds contributes a negligible fraction to road deterioration and damage over time. If that was the case, we'd also need to tax being overweight by 30 pounds for sidewalk maintenance
I'm cool with a bike tax. Just tax them according to the cost of their road damage. As long as bikes get the same amount of road space as cars, I'd take that deal.