That's clearly a lie. If the motivation was for EVs to pay their share of road funding the fee would be quite a bit less than $250.
The federal gas tax is $0.184/gallon. The EV is equivalent to the gas tax on just under 1860 gallons. For the average ICE driver they would need to be driving over 35k miles a year to use that much. That's 2.6x what the average ICE driver does per year.
And it will get worse over time because they have indexed the EV fee to inflation. The gas tax is not indexed and has not been updated since 1993.
If this really was about just fairly sharing road maintenance they would have either:
1. set the EV tax to around $90 and either started indexing the gas tax too or made the EV tax non-indexed, or
2. raised the gas tax to $0.41/gal (where it would be now had it been index starting in 1993) and indexed going forward, and set the EV to that times the amount of gas an average ICE would use driving the average amount people in the US drive per year, which comes out this year to around $210.
Not just no credits, a straight up "sin tax" for owning an EV or hybrid.
I get EVs don’t pay through gas tax, and they’re generally heavier so do more damage.
But I don’t think we should be doing anything to disincentivize EVs. We should be pushing them more.
Just raise the registration fees on all cars, consider it a pollution tax for ICE cars.
Of course none of this matters. We all know why this legislation was pushed. And this debate I’m discussing wasn’t it.
Weight is less than a rounding error considering how much damage trucks and buses do.
But yeah kinda weird Musk congratulated both Luxon and Trump when they both went against EVs.
Tax credits removed: which is probably an environmental benefit because a credit on vehicle purchase is not aligned with carbon reduction (e.g. low usage second car). Plus the credits were often regressive taxation (new car buyers are wealthy, and the trickle down is too far away to be carbon friendly).
Taxation was added per km on NZ for EVs, so that roads are funded by EVs too (roads were mostly funded by petrol/diesel taxes). Article said "which they claim is to fund road repairs traditionally supported by gas taxes". NZ roads are mostly funded by very expensive petrol/diesel taxes.
Political aside: I have been wondering what Musk's goal was in taking on the poisoned job with doge: Trump hasn't been helping Musk and I can't see why he would.
This isn't the same as funneling money directly from the federal coffers, but it's not just a conspiracy theory that he's using his position to enrich himself.