How would pay per mile car tax work?

I just hope it's done sensibly enough that us rural folk aren't penalised as stuff is just further away.

50 mile round trip to one place i work and 80 to the other, 17 mile round trip to the closest affordable supermarket etc.

And the rubbish but is we don't have a choice, the buses only come once every 75 minutes and go to one place which is the opposite direction from my workplace or my kids school...
 
The only way that I could see this work is that VED becomes a retrospective tax bill that gets sent to you after your MOT.

Your MOT is up June1st. So you drive in for your MOT on june 1st 2023. Mileage is 13,000 miles. Wait 12 months, car comes in for MOT due June1st 2024. Mileage is now 18,000 miles so that means in the last month you've driven 6,000 miles.

Government then has sliding scale of mileage charges, and a multiplier based upon your tailpipe emissions whereby electrics and hybrids still pay - but get a reduction. This would be a great time to swap the current system and make diesel more expensive than petrol in a push to right previous wrongs and get people into vehicles that have cleaner emissions - not just less co2. Would no doubt make tax more expensive for some - but would offset by a reduction for those who don't use the car very much and could end up paying very little difference. This makes sense in the long run - yes you drive a vehicle with nasty nox emissions - but if you don't drive it very much then you're not actually polluting that much. If you do drive it a lot - you pollute more and thus pay more. EV drivers now have to pay tax to account for their fare share of the impact on the roads and running them and the overall government finances, and crucially this still works in a 100% EV future which the current system doesn't. The mileage offset for EV / hybrid can be tweaked in future as part of the annual statement yo raise / lower taxes as required.

This is then sent to you as a tax bill which you can pay as usual - either up front 100% there and then, or spread over direct debit for the next year until you get your next one.

No GPS trackers, no sim cards, no GPS blockers etc.. the only thing that defeats this system is rolling back a cars mileage. I believe this is already illegal, but if not the legislation that brings this in would be a perfect time to make rolling back or messing with your milage on the car a specific legal offense.

Only change is that VED goes from being a fixed yearly tax to a retrospective one for last years usage. Any other system that revolves around actually phsyically monitoring your milage (GPS trackers, cameras on the road, government monitoring your electricity usage at home, government registration of EV chargers and rewnewable energcy etc..) Are all stupid

Only other alternative I can see working is the suggestion above about just simply charging by weight and removing fuel from the equation. Downside to that is the government likes to use vehicle tax to push people in certain directions. They did it to push us to dielsel, they're doing it now to push us to EV. You base it on weight and now there's no difference between the cleanest of brand new EVs and the dirtiest of old smoky diesels. Which I can bet the environmentalists won't like.
 
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sovietspybob said:
I just hope it's done sensibly enough that us rural folk aren't penalised as stuff is just further away.

50 mile round trip to one place i work and 80 to the other, 17 mile round trip to the closest affordable supermarket etc.

And the rubbish but is we don't have a choice, the buses only come once every 75 minutes and go to one place which is the opposite direction from my workplace or my kids school...
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Incidentally, how much does your average annual mileage differ ? National average is around 7.5k miles apparently (source: https://www.britanniacarleasing.co....~:text=Average Annual Mileage in the,Urban vs.)
 
sovietspybob said:
I just hope it's done sensibly enough that us rural folk aren't penalised as stuff is just further away.

50 mile round trip to one place i work and 80 to the other, 17 mile round trip to the closest affordable supermarket etc.

And the rubbish but is we don't have a choice, the buses only come once every 75 minutes and go to one place which is the opposite direction from my workplace or my kids school...
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Im in suburbia, but it's similar for me. All the jobs in my field require a commute to a place I can't get to via public transport.

I just don't think it can work fairly with the current state of public transport/services.
 
Nasher said:
Im in suburbia, but it's similar for me. All the jobs in my field require a commute to a place I can't get to via public transport.

I just don't think it can work fairly with the current state of public transport/services.
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Could be like me, there is no public transport when I need to get to work if I'm on mornings or none after I finish if I work lates because I'm the one driving the bus !
 
Nasher said:
Careful now, the EV mob will lynch you. Their 2-3+ ton cars cause no extra surface damage!
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Because they don’t. Roads are designed for >44T artics rolling over them, adding 200-300 kg for your average EV isn’t going to make any difference.

2-3T cars existed before EVs were a thing, car parks didn’t didn’t fall down then either.
 
robj20 said:
Yeah 10 minutes. Clocks, body control module, ecu, everything.

Everyone will be fitting the biggest tyres they can as well pretty easy to get another 5% or more.
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But would people be so keen to do it if they made it a specific criminal offense to do it and would enough people have the desire to break the law and have the tools to do it such that it actually hit the bottom line and made it not viable ? because any kind of scheme that monitors your usage is going to suspectible to fraud to cheat whatever system you put in place. Using MOT mileage is just the best compromise because it doesn't involve any government monitoring and surveillance of it's citizens. The government could go full 9 yards on this and make apps / devices that enable you to alter the mileage illegal. Would be a whole lot harder if this stuff was banned, restricted and generally sent underground.

Given a choice between the government monitoring my electricity usage, or having a GPS tracker on my phone with the government checking my every month - or have a scheme that some people will be brazen enough to break to the law to circumvent which means that perhaps not everybody pays the full price and a small minority cheat the system

I'll take the latter.
 
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It could be against the law but no one is going to monitor it or enforce it.

Put it another way, no MOT tester is going to be doing an in depth analysis of ECU modules for their £35. Likewise, no MOT tester is going to want any part in attempting to police how much tax people way.
 
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Fr0dders said:
The only way that I could see this work is that VED becomes a retrospective tax bill that gets sent to you after your MOT.
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Even that has a lot of issues like if someone loses their job it could push them into a hideous debt situation and generally makes financial planning a nightmare. Even a system with pre-paid blocks is pretty clunky.
 
b0rn2sk8 said:
Because they don’t. Roads are designed for >44T artics rolling over them, adding 200-300 kg for your average EV isn’t going to make any difference.

2-3T cars existed before EVs were a thing, car parks didn’t didn’t fall down then either.
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Doing damage to the road actually gets quite complicated - I already knew you have to consider things like ground pressure and the type of contact made but looking it up there is some really gnarly maths and involves some really deep diving into things like longitudinal dynamics, etc. etc. and even the distance between wheels and vehicle weight per axel has a huge impact on how much damage a vehicle does to the road surface.

A tank for instance usually has far less ground pressure than a passenger car despite being far heavier, but tracks will do far more damage to the road surface. Large goods vehicles have the weight spread out over lots of large tyres and isn't as proportionally worse than a car than you might think instinctively.

And then you can really go down the rabbit hole - small wheels on a high torque EV can have quite a high impact on the road surface, but larger wheels on an EV reduce the energy efficiency - 17" v 19" can be almost 10% difference.
 
Fr0dders said:
But would people be so keen to do it if they made it a specific criminal offense to do it and would enough people have the desire to break the law and have the tools to do it such that it actually hit the bottom line and made it not viable ? because any kind of scheme that monitors your usage is going to suspectible to fraud to cheat whatever system you put in place. Using MOT mileage is just the best compromise because it doesn't involve any government monitoring and surveillance of it's citizens. The government could go full 9 yards on this and make apps / devices that enable you to alter the mileage illegal. Would be a whole lot harder if this stuff was banned, restricted and generally sent underground.

Given a choice between the government monitoring my electricity usage, or having a GPS tracker on my phone with the government checking my every month - or have a scheme that some people will be brazen enough to break to the law to circumvent which means that perhaps not everybody pays the full price and a small minority cheat the system

I'll take the latter.
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Milage clocking would be rampant, there wouldn't be enough resources to monitor/check it. The police already can't keep tabs on uninsured drivers, now they want to add another layer. You can do some cars yourself just with an OBD adapter and laptop. Change it before MOT and keep a note of what it should be, change it back when you sell it.
 
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Belgian solution, earlier in thread, where mileage is legally noted on any garage/service intervention fixed most of their clocking problem,
plus latest eu anti-tamper rules (manufacturer liability)
 
You mean it was clocked just before entering the garage so nobody had a clue…

It’s already against the law to tamper with a car’s odometer for the purpose of committing fraud which is what this would be. It’s also against the law to commit tax evasion, people still do both.
 
sovietspybob said:
I just hope it's done sensibly enough that us rural folk aren't penalised as stuff is just further away.

50 mile round trip to one place i work and 80 to the other, 17 mile round trip to the closest affordable supermarket etc.

And the rubbish but is we don't have a choice, the buses only come once every 75 minutes and go to one place which is the opposite direction from my workplace or my kids school...
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Yea I live in a rural area the bus goes once a day each way.
 
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