{"id":8796,"date":"2018-09-07T07:52:45","date_gmt":"2018-09-06T21:52:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.privatefleet.com.au\/blog\/?p=8796"},"modified":"2020-06-20T00:22:59","modified_gmt":"2020-06-19T14:22:59","slug":"electric-vehicles-what-will-happen-with-the-fuel-taxes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.privatefleet.com.au\/blog\/blog\/electric-vehicles-what-will-happen-with-the-fuel-taxes\/","title":{"rendered":"Electric Vehicles: What Will Happen With The Fuel Taxes?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"I think we all know by now that electric cars and hybrids are much more common on the roads than they used to be.\u00a0 It\u2019s 20 years since the original Toyota Prius\u00a0<\/a> \u2013 the groundbreaking first hybrid vehicle \u2013 hit the roads, which means that if you\u2019ve got your eyes open, you can score a second-hand hybrid.\u00a0 They\u2019re getting better and better with extended range and more body types coming with hybrid and even all-electric versions.<\/p>\n

One of the reasons put forward for why you should switch to an electric or hybrid vehicle \u2013 and you hear this one more often with pure electrics \u2013 is that electricity is cheaper than petrol or diesel, so it\u2019s cheaper to fill up.\u00a0 You\u2019re not paying all that tax.<\/p>\n

Ah yes \u2013 the tax.\u00a0 Can anyone else spot the potential problem here?\u00a0 What will happen if a large proportion of us switched to purely electric vehicles?\u00a0 This means that one particular source of government income is going to drop dramatically.\u00a0 Can we see the government smiling happily about this and how we\u2019re polluting so much less, etc. and just carrying on without the tax coming from fuel?\u00a0 Maybe they could take a cut in their salaries or spend less on frivolous projects and fancy-pants conferences.\u00a0 Ooh look \u2013 a flying pig.\u00a0 Better get out your manure-proof umbrella.<\/p>\n

OK, if we take a less cynical view and make the charitable assumption that the fuel taxes get used to keep the roads in good order.\u00a0 If we don\u2019t want our roads to deteriorate if loads of people switch to electric vehicles, that money has got to come from somewhere.\u00a0 But where?\u00a0 What are the options?<\/p>\n

The first option would be to hike up the fuel tax to cover the shortfall.\u00a0 There are two problems with this one.\u00a0 The first is that even though there are some second-hand hybrids knocking about and even though we do our best here at Private Fleet to get you the best deals on a new car, pure electric vehicles still tend to be at the newer end of the spectrum and are beyond the budget of a low-income family (especially if said family needs a larger vehicle than the little hatchbacks that early examples of hybrids tended to be).\u00a0 This leads to a vicious cycle: they can\u2019t afford to upgrade to an electric with the higher petrol prices, which means they have to keep on using the expensive fuel, etc. or switch to using public transport if they live in towns.<\/p>\n

The other people who will get hit hard by this hypothetical hike in fuel taxes are those in rural communities.\u00a0 Although range of electrics is getting better, it\u2019s not quite where it needs to be for those out the back of beyond: the park rangers, the tour guides in the Outback and the district nurses and midwives.\u00a0 Going electric isn\u2019t really an option for them \u2013 and the sort of vehicles needed by your park rangers and tour guides (i.e. big 4 x4s) don\u2019t usually come in electric (although that\u2019s starting to change).\u00a0 What\u2019s more, the big rigs and farm tractors don\u2019t come in electric versions either (electric tractors exist but they\u2019re puny), so they\u2019ll keep on needing diesel.\u00a0 This means that their costs will go up with a hypothetical fuel tax hike, which probably means that farmers and trucking companies will go out of business or else they\u2019ll pass the costs along and we\u2019ll all have higher food prices.\u00a0 It\u2019s like the old army wisdom about not pissing off the person who cooks: you don\u2019t ever brush off the farming community as unimportant, because they are the ones who produce your food and most of us like to eat.<\/p>\n

OK, so the knock-on consequences to rural communities and a lot of Australia\u2019s industries would throw our economy into chaos (just think of all the diesel-powered machines involved in the mining industry, for example \u2013 although there are some rugged electric utes that have been specifically designed for the mining industry).\u00a0 The Powers That Be hopefully aren\u2019t that stupid and they are more likely to find a fairer way of getting the tax money than simply increasing the existing tax.\u00a0 What\u2019s much more likely is that they\u2019ll create a new tax.\u00a0 Any guesses as to what that new tax is likely to be?\u00a0 It doesn\u2019t take a genius to figure out that if people are using electricity instead of using petrol and diesel and thus avoiding the fuel tax, the obvious thing to slap a tax on is the electricity…<\/p>\n

You read it here first, folks.\u00a0 Although at the moment, using electric vehicles will save you at the plug (rather than the pump), it\u2019s only going to be a matter of time until a tax appears, especially as electric vehicles become more common.\u00a0 Yes, there are other advantages to using electric vehicles such as the reduced pollution and how they don\u2019t depend on a finite resource (biofuels aside), but the advantage of not paying a fuel tax won\u2019t last forever.<\/p>\n

Enjoy it while you can! http:\/\/credit-n.ru\/zaymi-nalichnymi-blog-single.html<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I think we all know by now that electric cars and hybrids are much more common on the roads than they used to be.\u00a0 It\u2019s 20 years since the original Toyota Prius\u00a0 \u2013 the groundbreaking first hybrid vehicle \u2013 hit the roads, which means that if you\u2019ve got your eyes open, you can score a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[86],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8796","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.privatefleet.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8796","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.privatefleet.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.privatefleet.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.privatefleet.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.privatefleet.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8796"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.privatefleet.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8796\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11183,"href":"https:\/\/www.privatefleet.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8796\/revisions\/11183"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.privatefleet.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8796"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.privatefleet.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8796"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.privatefleet.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8796"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}