We Should Be Talking About an EV Tax — But Not This One

When Elon Musk became a major backer of President Trump last year, some in the electric vehicle camp saw a glimmer of hope. Perhaps, with the CEO of the world’s top EV maker in his corner, Trump would soften some of his anti-electric rhetoric and come around on EVs.

Musk has been the most visible member of the new Trump regime during its chaotic first few weeks. Yet even with his outsized role, the new government’s pushback against electric vehicles continues full steam ahead. On Wednesday, Republican senators introduced double-barreled anti-EV legislation: The first bill would kill every kind of tax credit for buying electric, whether new, used, or lease, as well as incentives for charging stations. The second would place an extra tax of $1,000 on all EV purchases.

The first measure is no surprise given that Trump and the GOP have railed against EV incentives for years and promised to take the country back to the good old days of oil drilling. The second is, at least nominally, an attempt to tackle a legitimate question about the transition to electric vehicles — who pays to fix the roads — albeit with a solution that’s clearly meant to punish the kind of people who want to buy an electric car.

A federal gasoline tax of 18.4 cents per gallon helps fund highway maintenance, and states add their own taxes on top of that. But EV owners don’t buy gasoline, which means they don't contribute to road repair in this way. Economists have floated various solutions to make this situation more equitable and see EVs pay their fair share. States have tried more blunt tactics, such as tacking on hundreds of dollars to the cost of an electric car’s annual registration.

The senators’ proposed fix is to slap on a $1,000 fee to every electric vehicle purchase at the point of sale. The argument is that people who drive gas cars contribute about $100 in gas taxes annually, so charging EV buyers $1,000 brings in a decade’s worth of what they should be paying.

This is an unsophisticated and antagonistic answer to a serious question. The gas tax, while imperfect, at least has the effect of charging people based on how much they drive, which is correlated with how much wear and tear they cause to the public roads. It has the bonus of incentivizing people to drive lighter and more fuel-efficient vehicles. Charging per mile is trickier to do with EVs. The government could impose some kind of tax per kilowatt-hour at public charging stations, but most owners do most of their charging at home, where there’s no simple way to charge them more for the electricity that powers their car versus the juice that’s used for the refrigerator or the vacuum cleaner.

Charging EV drivers a flat thousand bucks at the point of sale, however, forces them to pay for a decade’s worth of taxes up front, something gasoline drivers would never be asked to do. It also presumes the buyer is going to keep the vehicle for at least 10 years, and includes no provision for any other scenario. (It’s not like the government is going to refund you $500 if you sell the vehicle after five years. You’re footing the bill for the second owner.)

Not that the bill’s proponents have any problem trotting out specious math. Senator Deb Fischer of Nebraska justified the dubious tax by arguing that “EVs can weigh up to three times as much as gas-powered cars, creating more wear and tear on our roads and bridges."

This is bogus. As Heatmap has noted numerous times, EV weight is a serious matter with implications for issues including pedestrian safety and tire wear. But “three times as much” is a reach that rests on an impressive feat of cherry-picking, akin to comparing a monstrous vehicle like the GMC Hummer EV to a Toyota Corolla. Here’s a more accurate comparison: The nation’s and the world’s top-selling EV, Tesla’s Model Y, has a curb weight of around 4,400 pounds. That’s almost exactly the same as the base curb weight of the Ford F-150 — which, by the way, is the most popular vehicle in Senator Fischer’s state of Nebraska.

As usual, the only substance at play is identity politics. There is a grown-up discussion to be had about taxing EVs, and whether they ought to enjoy benefits such as federal incentives and lower taxes because of the public good they create by lowering carbon emissions. What we continue to get instead is a naked attempt to punish the kinds of Americans who want to drive electric.

On some level, it still feels weird that all this is happening alongside Musk’s public turn as de facto U.S. president. But with so much power to influence the federal government, Tesla’s CEO has convinced himself he doesn’t have to care about the state of the EV market and whether ordinary Americans can afford his cars — at least, not while he’s puttering around the Oval Office and his company is reportedly winning $400 million contracts to build armored electric vehicles for Uncle Sam.