The EV Pay Per Kilometre Tax

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In the last two days I noticed several posts speaking about an upcoming tax for electric vehicles that will charge people per mile driven, as there is with petrol cars. In theory people will be charged a flat fee for the first year, and then per kilometre from then onwards.

I don’t see how this would work in practice because of two things. The first is that if you’re on a road trip you’re using public chargers and the price to charge is from 38 centimes to 1.10 CHF per kilowatt/Hour. In other words a scale could already be applied to “tax” people straight from public chargers.

The second issue that I see is that if people charge at home, or at work, and it is counted as normal electricity then the flat fee makes partial, rather than full sense. It’s absurd to make people pay the tax twice. Once as an estimate of how much they will drive, and then every time they charge, for it to be added to the cost of charging.

That cost could be 23 centimes per kilowatt hour. That doubles the cost per kilowatt hour when charging cars from home.

For perspective, if you drive at 11kw/h per 100 kilometres of efficiency, then you get to 2.53 CHF per 100 km. The more relaxed your driving, the less you pay on tax. It would be about 4.23 per 100km with a petrol car, so an EV is half as expensive, in theory, even with the tax.

I prefer to pay according to what I use, rather than an estimation. I stopped using petrol cars because I was tired of paying for petrol, long before I replaced the car with an EV.

We’ll see when the road tax is added to EV charging.