How would pay per mile car tax work?

there's already a huge number of cars being clocked as it is with people taking out low milage lease deals and then just generally wanting to keep the value of their car up.

No one really likes to talk about it but it's rampant with more powerful/enthusiast cars, do we really believe all those Honda type R's, Subaru STi's, Evos, GTR's etc have such low milage and are really only driven 1500 miles a year?

I'd wager a lot of them have a milage haircut fairly regularly before each MOT to keep the value up as it is, if you're linking fairly substantial amounts of tax money to it it'll be everywhere.
 
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Can't they just put the tax on fuel & mandate that all EV chargers have some kind of usage monitor installed? Tax the electricity used to charge them?
 
sovietspybob said:
People would just plug in with the 3pin charger instead so the electric isn't going through the EV charger, no way to tell it apart from running a 2 bar electric fire then.
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Or via a commando socket and get the full 7kw. No way to tell if I’m charging my home battery or my EV.

You can make your own EVSE easily enough.
 
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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.

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.
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This only works in an environment where you can only cover any sort of significant mileage on roads which are subject to this form of taxation. It is therefore how it works in New Zealand, where virtually zero cars will spend any time driving outside of New Zealand. But in a well connected country like the UK, which shares a land border another country, this doesn't work.



Fr0dders said:
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.
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There is absolutely no need to this. Firstly it would be incredibly unjust given the reason there are so many diesel passengers is because the government intended for that to happen and pushed the market that way through taxation. But whether you agree with that or not its also irrelevant - diesel is finished and will solve itself. It is very difficult to buy a new diesel these days - some of the best manufacturers of diesel cars no longer offer them throughout most of the range - so this problem will solve itself and diesel passenger cars will eventually exist only in a volume so small it makes little real difference.

I'm sure we won't make the mistake again of picking a particular form of power and then making everyone go down that route whether they want to or not...
 
Fr0dders said:
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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You just do a multiplier in this case, so some standard weight bands based on GVW, then the adder 0% if EV, +5% if PHEV, + 10% if petrol, +15% if diesel, none of it is hard all the info is on the log books, you could even take in more factors like the CO2 etc again all on the log book and is just simple maths, a software update and we are done.

Absolutely no need for a tracking system and silly costs to administer, country is supposed to be broke after all.

Our car taxes are quite low compared to many countries even paying the premium tax cars taxes are still very low.
 
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sovietspybob said:
there's already a huge number of cars being clocked as it is with people taking out low milage lease deals and then just generally wanting to keep the value of their car up.

No one really likes to talk about it but it's rampant with more powerful/enthusiast cars, do we really believe all those Honda type R's, Subaru STi's, Evos, GTR's etc have such low milage and are really only driven 1500 miles a year?

I'd wager a lot of them have a milage haircut fairly regularly before each MOT to keep the value up as it is, if you're linking fairly substantial amounts of tax money to it it'll be everywhere.
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BMWs are a minefield for it.

A lot of enthusiast cars are genuinely low milage though as people with a lot of miles to do don't tend to buy them, or they are second/weekend cars.

But yep it will 100% be rampant if they do this. The new norm will be to not trust the odo and focus on other things to try and determine milage when buying.
 
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jpaul said:
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)
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Hopefully they'll allow for fat fingered Fred the back street mechanic who enters the numbers wrong. My MX5 has a mileage flag when you do a history search on the reg because they typed the mileage wrong at an MOT (less than the previous years mileage) and I failed to spot it for a year :o



:(
 
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lordrobs said:
Hopefully they'll allow for fat fingered Fred the back street mechanic who enters the numbers wrong. My MX5 has a mileage flag when you do a history search on the reg because they typed the mileage wrong at an MOT (less than the previous years mileage) and I failed to spot it for a year :o



:(
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Ah yeah i had that, they somehow managed to read one of my trip meters instead of the actual odo even though there was a digit missing.. so one year the car lost about 40k miles on its MOT

Went from 69,596 miles to 48,326 miles then back up to 92,478 miles the following year :cry:
 
Another common one is imported cars where they sometimes enter KM as miles. Big tax bill...

One of mine had the cluster replaced (never bothered to correct the milage) and it went from about 70k to a few 100 on one MOT
 
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Nasher said:
BMWs are a minefield for it.

A lot of enthusiast cars are genuinely low milage though as people with a lot of miles to do don't tend to buy them, or they are second/weekend cars.

But yep it will 100% be rampant if they do this. The new norm will be to not trust the odo and focus on other things to try and determine milage when buying.
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Yeah i just think back to when i had my Honda DC5, almost all of them were suspiciously low milage even though back in the day loads of people on the forum daily drove them..

Mine had a problem with the speedo converter for a while after i had the gearbox out so it spent several months without the speedo working at all.. i can't imagine that's too uncommon.
 
lordrobs said:
Hopefully they'll allow for fat fingered Fred the back street mechanic who enters the numbers wrong. My MX5 has a mileage flag when you do a history search on the reg because they typed the mileage wrong at an MOT (less than the previous years mileage) and I failed to spot it for a year :o
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I really can't see how testers manage to do this.
If one enters a mileage less than last year it gives you a warning..

EDxnrW7.png


And even if one confirms it, you get another warning afterwards.
 
JonRGV250 said:
I really can't see how testers manage to do this.
If one enters a mileage less than last year it gives you a warning..

EDxnrW7.png


And even if one confirms it, you get another warning afterwards.
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Yeah, in my case they entered a value of 1000 miles more than the actual reading, so the following year when the correct reading was put in it showed as -87 miles :rolleyes:

Date Mileage Yearly Total
23/08/2024 49,335 586
05/09/2023 48,749 973
17/09/2021 47,776 965
17/07/2020 46,811 -87
31/07/2019 46,898 2,444
28/07/2018 44,454 1,655
02/08/2017 42,799 -
 
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Obviously we’re not the brightest bunch :cry:
Mileage is one of the very few things we can change after the MOT results have been logged.
Certainly worth checking, not that you should have to.
 
lordrobs said:
How does recording mileage at the MOT work for 0-3 year old cars? :confused:
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The system already allows for one off higher charges for new cars where the tax in year 1 is higher than after. Just do a similar system here and charge fixed fees in the first 3 years and then move to pay per mile after 3 years.

The way I see it they can do it one of two ways

1. A fixed price, but fixed on some other value other than tailpipe emissions. Base it upon vehicle weight, the original purchase price of the vehicle when new, the vehicle length or width etc..
2. A variable price based upon the amount the car is used

Government seems keen to use the opportunity to move away from tailpipe emissions to move to paying for usage of the roads. I'd much rather just swap it to one based upon the purchase price of the vehicle where expensive cars for rich people pay more, and cheaper consumer cars for the masses pay less. But There's an argument that this isn't fair -as your £1 million supercar probably only does a few hundred miles a year, maybe crossing over 1k miles a year, paying much much more in tax despite using the roads less and polluting them less. But that's the price you get away from moving from tailpipe emissions and to taxing people on their wealth like income tax, and not on their usage or pollution.

Of the ways to charge you per mile, it has to be some system of auditing your usage retrospectively. It's not acceptable to have the government monitoring your every movement like that - not even china's surveillance state has all of their cars GPS tracked by government. Problem is every way of doing option 2 will involve some way of cheating it. Blocking your GPS signal, clocking your mileage etc.. and I guess it's a judgement call as to whether that method and it's drawbacks, is better or worse taxing people based upon the physical properties of the car as it is now - but just swapping from tailpipe emissions to some other physical characteristic.

There is no perfect solution which is why we're all going round in circles debating...
 
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sovietspybob said:
there's already a huge number of cars being clocked as it is with people taking out low milage lease deals and then just generally wanting to keep the value of their car up.

No one really likes to talk about it but it's rampant with more powerful/enthusiast cars, do we really believe all those Honda type R's, Subaru STi's, Evos, GTR's etc have such low milage and are really only driven 1500 miles a year?

I'd wager a lot of them have a milage haircut fairly regularly before each MOT to keep the value up as it is, if you're linking fairly substantial amounts of tax money to it it'll be everywhere.
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Ive had gtrs and quite often id barely do 500 miles a year. I spent more time upgrading them and working on them. I've also had evos and type R's which I drove daily.

They're all very easy to clock though.
 
JonRGV250 said:
I really can't see how testers manage to do this.
If one enters a mileage less than last year it gives you a warning..



And even if one confirms it, you get another warning afterwards.
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I work in an industry where there is a lot of stuff like that - entering numbers on forms with confirmations, etc. there is not entirely a shortage of people who just don't care and will click confirm with a *whatever* attitude and/or just hit whatever combination is easiest - even when there are legal repercussions.

We let one go in November 2022 after only 2-3 weeks of employment and I was still finding and having to correct where they'd done stuff like that until around May this year...

EDIT: I really need to voice about it getting logged/monitored more - there is a weekly report but it has kind of been designed with the notion that people aren't that stupid so doesn't fully capture it all.
 
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Might be best just to go to a flat rate on every car rather than base it on miles. It's unfair for low users, but just charge everyone something like 200-250 a year and it's sorted. This should affect all cars apart from classics imo, there's no reason old diesels should avoid it :p .
 
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