A New Pay-Per-Mile Tax System Is Reportedly Being Considered by the Government

I’m not certain I agree with the premise that mileage is a good indicator of road wear.

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.

It should be simple enough to use the odometer. If the vehicle drives significantly outside the country or on private roads, then a GPS-based odometer seems simple enough. I'm sure a 1GB SD-card can geofence the public road network of most countries so that the taxed odometer rolls only when on taxed roads.

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.

People who read the article don’t need to worry about this happening. As the article explains, it’s a fee per mile, not a flat fee that kicks in at the 10000th mile.

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.

> Also, what about people who live in rural areas and do school runs or work further.

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.

You got a loicense for that road trip?

They already have a monitoring system... TPMS. Four distinct IDs for every vehicle passing a location makes for a good fingerprint (they've been using this for years to estimate traffic levels)

Add in something like Flock license plate reading and you now know which vehicle it was.

Fuel duty works out at about 5p/mile. Slightly more for thirstier vehicles, slightly less for lighter vehicles.

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.

Don't cars in the UK need regular inspections? The MOT already records mileage at regular intervals for any car over 3 years old.