If you could afford the first 9800 miles, you can afford the other 300 miles to get to grandma’s for Christmas.
> this makes no sense
Indeed.
Frankly, it's overdue for them to pay their fair share and for the rest of the world to stop subsidizing them.
We've been subsidizing cars and rural lifestyles for so long that people feel entitled to them, but it certainly doesn't have to be that way.
It would be helpful if those who are opposed to this solution propose their own which addresses this specific problem.
I can think of a couple others, neither of which are great:
1. All freeways become toll roads. 2. Increase the gas tax even more, basically explicitly subsidizing electric vehicles.
Add in something like Flock license plate reading and you now know which vehicle it was.
There are two options:
1. A dongle with GPS, mobile connectivity and some other features would be installed to all vehicles. This makes it easy to implement the system, but would be a logistical nightmare.
2. The government could receive information directly from the manufacturers, but that a) can be a privacy nightmare, b) would work only on cars manufactured after 2016 or so, and c) is insanely complex to implement, due to differences and incompleteness of various manufacturer's API implementations (source: I worked on one such system).
One solution that comes to mind is to use the same technology that already exists for traffic violations: when a vehicle enters or leaves the motorway it would get its licence plate scanned, and a fee would be applied to that vehicle's account. The owner can then be charged in a number of different ways - immediately, or periodically, or after a certain threshold was reached - whichever is the most practical.
There is zero need to implement anything for petrol or diesel vehicles, which nicely eliminates the "pre-2016" problem (How many 10 year old electric vehicles are there? Not enough to worry about). I'd be inclined to provide a government API, and require the manufacturers to provide the data in a specified format. Make it part of type approval for use on the UK roads.
Not impossible, nor should a VIN + Mileage number be particularly risky for privacy concerns - the number should be pushed regularly, to prevent wind-back tricks.
15p/mile has got to be a joke though. That'd be the equivalent of setting fuel duty to £1.50/litre - it would immediately shag what's left of the economy.
Knowing how this industry works, good luck making something like this a reality, especially in a single country. Even if the EU tried enforcing something like that (with the UK piggybacking on it), it is still a small portion of the market.
Sadly, this is not a technical problem, but a political one. That said, I agree with you, and we can always dream.
Arainach•3mo ago
Unfortunately, these proposals all seem to end up at "let the government location track your vehicle at all times", which is a privacy disaster - a disaster even worse than the current widespread use of automatic license plate readers. Unless such conditions are removed these programs are gross curtailments of freedom which should be opposed.
slau•3mo ago
I do about 30k km in a typical year. My families live far, so a return trip is around 4000 km.
If we visit our family 3x/year, we’ve effectively exhausted this “10k mile” thing (I don’t live in the UK, but the point still stands), however very little of our actual mileage would be in our home country. To be precise, only 300km out of 2000.
If I go in other directions, the math gets even worse. I can leave the country in 30km and add 800-3000km of mileage for a scuba trip.
Arainach•3mo ago
What you're describing is a billing detail - how do ensure the right chunk of those fees goes to the owners of those roads? And that leads to the conundrum I posed - without tracking your location at all times there's no way to prove what number of miles were in one municipality versus another.
sogjis•3mo ago
Arainach•3mo ago
Road fees aren't just for the damage you're causing - they're for construction, signage, and many other pieces of infrastructure whose usage depends more on mileage than weight.
slau•3mo ago
There are many systems, many of them imperfect. The vignette system, per week/month seems maybe the most responsible, as it guarantees I’m paying my due in the place of and proportional to the amount of time I will be using the roads.
avidiax•3mo ago
Doesn't seem like a privacy nightmare, and this kind of system is more practical than an online server-based one, given that mobile signals are especially uncommon when off-roading or roaming internationally.
thaumasiotes•3mo ago
The odometer lets the owner know whether the car needs maintenance.
Also, it determines the resale value of the car, and in this context modifying a car's odometer is a crime.
If you start fining people for having certain odometer readings, you're doing a lot of damage to the idea that modifying the reading should be a crime.
In general, the more purposes you want something to serve, the less effective it's going to be at each of those purposes.
avidiax•3mo ago
The sort of people that roll back odometers are also the sort that steal post-pay gas by driving off and fail to carry insurance, and fill their diesel vehicles with tax-free dyed agricultural fuel, etc. They will have a scheme no matter the system, and the system will have a scheme for them.
thaumasiotes•3mo ago
Arainach•3mo ago
The odometer says how far the car has gone. Nothing is being changed about it.