All cars could be fitted with black box trackers under new tax plans

https://www.nationalworld.com/lifestyle/cars/all-cars-could-be-fitted-with-black-box-trackers-under-new-tax-plans-3567065

by HeckFeck • 4 years ago

92 95 4 years ago

nationalworld.com

shawabawa3• 4 years ago

In its report, the committee said: “If motoring taxation is linked to road usage, the committee has not seen a viable alternative to a road pricing system based on telematics.”

Considering you have to take your car for MOT every year it seems like an easy solution would be to require milage to be reported at your MOT to verify how much road tax you need to pay

chrisseaton2• 4 years ago

every year

New cars don't have to be taken for MOT for several years. After buying a car you don't need to even take it to a mechanic for the first two or so.

VBprogrammer4• 4 years ago

Either make the MOT required from new or have a sub-MOT milage check. It's a completely trivial problem.

lotsofpulp7• 4 years ago

Presumably the goal is to also reduce congestion, by having variable rate tolling that charges more for driving at high demand times and less for low demand times.

joefife• 4 years ago

Agreed - although remember the MOT only starts once the car is there years old. There is no MOT for the first few years.

Also, and more of an edge case, there are some vehicles that don't require an MOT, such as vintage vehicles (which also don't pay VED) and don't public sector fleets (such as police cars)

kawsper• 4 years ago

Maybe it could allow new vehicles to self-report yearly until the first MOT.

Normal_gaussian• 4 years ago

Also, there is significant evidence that reducing the frequency of MOTs would be a good thing all round (no real downside, until a car falls below a specific level).

dazc• 4 years ago

I guess the plan would be to base pricing in such a way that it will incentivise good behaviour? For example, a journey distance of 1 mile or less could be made so expensive that people choose to walk instead.

Sebb7672• 4 years ago

But this could also horribly backfire, with people driving ten miles to get gas or to the shopping center across town.

VBprogrammer4• 4 years ago

Indeed. It doesn't allow differential pricing per road type. Driving 10 miles through London is almost certainly worse than 10 miles down a country a road in terms of impact. Is that something worth giving up everyone's privacy? I personally don't think so, and I'm not even particularly privacy conscious.

Might that be more open to fraud than a telematic solution? Doubtful. Those people who would attempt to commit fraud that way will be just as likely to do so otherwise.

timthorn2• 4 years ago

The report calls for pricing to be dynamic based on time/congestion and take into account geography - a straight annual mileage report would not allow for this.

mytailorisrich4• 4 years ago

Dynamic pricing is just a way to justify trackers.

The main issue, though, is simply that when people buy an EV they stop paying massive amount of tax on petrol/diesel.

lastofthemojito• 4 years ago

That seems like a 99% solution, but the farmers or amateur racers who put mileage on their cars outside of public roads might be annoyed by that solution. Same with people who spent a lot of time driving outside of the UK.

But based on the privacy implications of the other approach, I'd much prefer yours, maybe with a way to submit documentation of off-road/out-of-country miles.

globular-toast2• 4 years ago

That seems like a 99% solution, but the farmers or amateur racers who put mileage on their cars outside of public roads might be annoyed by that solution.

They still release pollutants into the atmosphere, though.

BurningFrog• 4 years ago

Most of the point of road pricing is to charge (much) more At places and times where traffic is congested, so traffic flows well 24/7 and we don't have to keep adding lanes and freeways eternally for the non paying traffic.

verdverm4• 4 years ago

A problem with annual milage is annual tax. How many people are planning for a 4 figure tax bill? Gas tax is per fill and built in.

was_a_dev2• 4 years ago

Monthly tax bill for the year prior?

NovemberWhiskey4• 4 years ago

This is largely a solved problem; consider income tax. You "pay" (withhold) monthly and true-up at the end of the year.

michaelt• 4 years ago

The quote is for a report into "road pricing" [1] by which they seem to mean mean pricing individual roads, rather than roads collectively.

Right now, the country has a variety of toll roads, toll tunnels, toll bridges, congestion charge zones, low emission zones and suchlike. They can have complex pricing schemes - higher for more polluting vehicles, free at evenings and weekends, free for wheelchair users, higher during rush hour, free for taxis and busses. Dozens of schemes across the country have different ways of paying - and often the money goes to local, rather than national, government.

So I think a mileage tax was not in the scope of the report. This was a report specifically asking "what if all roads were toll roads?"

[1] https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm5802/cmselect/cmtran...

inter_netuser7• 4 years ago

They never heard of toll roads?

adflux• 4 years ago

This is also happening in the Netherlands.

Not a fan personally...

Gasoline cars already pay tax per mile, as gas is very heavily taxed. Electric cars do too, as electricity is also taxed pretty heavily. (Notice a trend yet?)

The only advantage is that there can be a more fine grained taxation of cars, based on time and location. But I don't trust my government with that kind of data.

lotsofpulp7• 4 years ago

Do they not already have even better data via mobile networks?

I am in the US and I assume the government has access to my location history to however accurate mobile networks are at any time, because I always have my phone on me.

65102• 4 years ago

Not knowing the answer I just read 3 and a half page. It seems the Dutch police only obtains location data in real time and only when someone is a suspect.

vinay427• 4 years ago

This wouldn't necessarily indicate the vehicle being used or its owner/registrant for tax purposes. Additionally, mobile network triangulation isn't usually as accurate as GPS or other satellite systems.

jeroenhd• 4 years ago

The disadvantage of taxing based on fuel is that it mostly benefits newer cars, generally owned by the richer groups in society. People barely able to afford a car are hit by a pollution tax they can hardly work around, because it's either "pay the fuel tax" or "get another job", and despite the so-called labour shortage, that's not as easy as it seems if you're not educated.

In terms of taxing pollution the Dutch system is actually quite reasonable, because there's barely any green energy being produced in the country compared to the old fossil fuel plants. All that "green" electricity is just a piece of paper that says the joules come from some hydro plant in Norway, but they don't actually come from a green source, of course. If you can charge your car by solar panels, you'll be much better off.

Taxing by distance actually taxes road use rather than fuel exhaustion, which is a much better way to tax for road maintenance in my opinion. The heavy electric cars do a much bigger number on the roads than grandma's city car from twenty years ago.

In an optimal system, both taxes would be combined and balanced. However, the government has shown that it will abuse any data it collects for other purposes, and balancing things isn't one of the government's strong suits either. It's sad, really.

Sebb7672• 4 years ago

The disadvantage of taxing based on fuel is that it mostly benefits newer cars, generally owned by the richer groups in society

At the point we currently are, even 10-15 year old cars can get a good mileage. Sports cars and aggressive driving, on the other hand, can't. So while it's not perfect, I think the system actually works quite well.

Additionally, taxing fuel has the advantage that people 'feel the pain' every time they refuel, which is a lot more effective than paying once a year.

mab1223• 4 years ago

Taxing by distance actually taxes road use rather than fuel exhaustion

Tax the tires then.

NovemberWhiskey4• 4 years ago

Gasoline cars already pay tax per mile, as gas is very heavily taxed. Electric cars do too, as electricity is also taxed pretty heavily.

In the UK, electricity is taxed at an effective rate of approximately €2 per TJ, whereas diesel and gasoline for transportation purposes are taxed more like €18-20 per TJ.

It seems pretty clear that that a large-scale switch to EVs is going to cause a pretty large tax hole unless something is done about it.

HPsquared4• 4 years ago

The tax savings and subsidies are a major driving force behind people getting EVs. They're inherently more expensive if those tax advantages were to be removed.

Currently it's carrot and stick, they'll eventually have to transition to a "smaller stick and larger stick" model.

pm215• 4 years ago

It means you can tax car usage more heavily than would be the case if you just taxed their electricity consumption at the same rate as electricity used for other purposes (like home lighting and heating), in a way analogous to how in the UK petrol and diesel used by cars is taxed much more heavily than petrol used for other purposes (eg heating, or agricultural vehicles). This is useful because it discourages heavy use of private vehicles and especially of inefficient ones (compare the UK or Europe to US car usage, culture, and vehicle preferences -- I can't help thinking US cheap gasoline is relevant there).

In the UK, petrol is taxed much more heavily than electricity currently is, incidentally.

But mostly this is about the fact that currently petrol and diesel taxes bring in a lot of money, so if we don't shift that onto "extra taxes on electric vehicles" then there's going to have to be a rise in general taxation -- which is generally not popular.

timthorn2• 4 years ago

Note that the proposal comes from a Select Committee of MPs - this isn't the Government. Select Committee reports often propose recommendations that the Government disagrees with and does not implement.

Actual report is here: https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm5802/cmselect/cmtran...

politelemon2• 4 years ago

This 'nationalworld.com' post barely contains any useful information, where they have applied their interpretation. It's better to read the original pages from the Transport Select Committee, where the information is better presented.

The 'news' page is here: https://committees.parliament.uk/committee/153/transport-com...

And their summary is here: https://ukparliament.shorthandstories.com/road-pricing-trans...

If you are time and curiosity rich, the full report is here: https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm5802/cmselect/cmtran...

politelemon2• 4 years ago

Separately, I can't help but wonder if there's some overlap with V2X https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle-to-everything

Many countries have already allocated spectrum for it, and it's supposedly in all new cars (anyone chime in?). The report has left out implementation details because that depends on how the Govt would want to do the data capture, but I hope motorists don't get a bunch of additional devices piled on... I might be thinking too much in terms of software development but I'm always looking for efficiency in reuse.

samwillis• 4 years ago

Worth baring in mind we in the UK have one of the most extensive ANPR (automatic number plate recognition) camera networks in the world.

We are already tracked on almost all our journeys. You are unlike to be able to make a journey on any A/M road in the UK without being tracked. Occasionally a criminal case appears in the news where it’s clear they were able to track the culprits across the country with the network.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_number-plate_recog...

sgjohnson3• 4 years ago

Worth baring in mind we in the UK have one of the most extensive ANPR (automatic number plate recognition) camera networks in the world.

Second only to China actually. That goes for cameras in general.

What a worthy adversary for #1.

Not to mention the enormous abuses with ANPR. It seems like it's mostly used to harass political dissidents. Tommy Robinson was routinely stopped and questioned by police.

Sure, nobody in their right mind likes Tommy Robinson, but targetted harassment by the police definitely isn't okay either.

HeckFeck• 4 years ago

I wasn't aware of this system. That made for some uncomfortable reading.

They had a capacity for 50 million daily number plate reads in 2006.

inter_netuser7• 4 years ago

Your phone is also tracked at all times, and maybe even constantly recording on its microphone. As is your computer.

Welcome to the concentration camp.

inter_netuser7• 4 years ago

So what then, we should just refuse to object and install cameras in our toilet bowls for their amusement?

markus_zhang• 4 years ago

The beautiful new world where everything is trackable and storage is so cheap that everything is stored.

Future generations won't even think it is weird.

trentnix• 4 years ago

And when it's possible to track what they think, they won't be allowed to think.

sol_invictus• 4 years ago

It's difficult to read sentiment and know whether you're being sarcastic or not so please take no offense from my tone, but this is the complete opposite of "beautiful" - it is the first steps in turning humans into units of production with every action being optimized for you and leaving little to no individual freedom.

It's communism 2.0 except the government doesn't only dictate production quotas but also "life quotas." It's an absolute nightmare and seeing what a spectacular failure communism 1.0 was, everyone should be more than freaking out about this.

sgjohnson3• 4 years ago

everyone should be more than freaking out about this. Yet nobody does. Because everyone is living too comfortable a life to dissent.

Just ask the Chinese. (general populace, not the government)

And that's basically a reason why I'm a libertarian, but unfortunately I don't see the future as more libertarian, unless there's a massive paradigm shift. The general populace will put up with whatever governmet oppression or tracking or whatever, as long as they can keep living their cushy, comfortable lives.

userbinator• 4 years ago

I'm pretty sure it's sarcastic and a reference to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_New_World

BoxOfRain• 4 years ago

It's not communism rather that same tendency that both communist and non-communist powers often display once they reach a certain size: the tendency of large bureaucracies towards increasing their own power and influence at the expense of the people they're supposed to serve. By declaring this tendency communist we blind ourselves to the fact this can happen to any bureaucracy whatever labels it gives itself. This can happen to the most cut-throat capitalist business as well as the most oppressive communist state, it's the nature of large organisations in general.

The British government hasn't built an illiberal surveillance state because it sits in the private clubs of London dreaming up ways to oppress the plebs for its own sake, it's done so because there's a lot of bureaucratic incentives towards this behaviour and the sum of millions of individual cogs without malice is the path of least resistance. It's why the police go after people over jokes made in poor taste on Twitter while burglaries might go uninvestigated, signals intelligence is far cheaper than actually investing in proactive policing and boots on the ground. Add that to the fact that people are easily scared and gaslit into giving up their liberties for promised safety and it's easy to see how these things about. Nothing to do with communism, although historical communist regimes often displayed this behaviour to a high degree.

The cure in my opinion is a government based on the principles of subsidiarity, decisions should be taken as close to the people they effect as possible at the lowest practical tier of government. Decentralising government as far as we can (preferably to council or even district level) and making it intentionally difficult for government entities to consolidate power in a meaningful way is how we prevent abuses of power to begin with, we must treat political power as we treat enriched uranium: incredibly useful and vital for civilisation but also very corrupting to biological life if not handled with extreme caution. The road to Hell isn't just paved with good intentions but sign-posted and landscaped with them too.

mellosouls• 4 years ago

UK Gov is not proposing any such thing. It's a proposal in a select committee report. Clickbait.

sgjohnson3• 4 years ago

Insanity. ~75% of the petrol price in the UK already is basically tax (fuel duty + VAT), and even more if you add indirect taxes too.

I'm actually glad that I don't live in the UK anymore.

kmlx2• 4 years ago

~75% of the petrol price in the UK already is basically tax (fuel duty + VAT), and even more if you add indirect taxes too.

it’s close to 0% tax if you’re using an electric car. which is why governments around the world are trying to figure this thing out.

65102• 4 years ago

I use to joke that its a miracle people are still allowed to go outside without a specific reason and/or permission. Corona made it less funny. I still have my pedestrians should wear reflective jackets helmets, safety shoes and knee pads joke. Curious how long that will last.

boringg2• 4 years ago

Outside of the obvious privacy and security concerns. Wouldn't the cost of tracking this heavily eat into the revenues from taxation? I can't see the government pulling this kind of operation without it costing a lot of money.

So the question is - is the difference between what the new net benefits be greater than the current system. And then you need to add both the political anger from security + privacy into the equation.

Someone• 4 years ago

I would think a main benefit would be that fewer roads need to be built and maintained. That’s serious cost cutting. Lower congestion also can be a huge gain.

Also, from what I understand the tracking already is somewhat solved in London.

friedturkey• 4 years ago

The potential for taxation is just a more presentable way of selling such a plan. Saying “we want to track your every movement” isn’t yet palatable. In another 10 years and some overhyped criminal incident later, it might be, though.

boringg2• 4 years ago

I guess all you need is a catalyst event to allow something like that.

anonu• 4 years ago

The UK is already a surveillance state. Cameras on every corner with sophisticated software to identify license plates and piece the data together. So the movement of people is already being tracked.

As for the cost of doing so? I would guess its already very cheap and only getting cheaper.

HideousKojima• 4 years ago

Even if taxation is the current sole honest intent of those proposing this (which I doubt), the reality is that any kind of data collection that can be abused will be abused. We've seen this worldwide, in pretty much every country. Don't give them an inch on this because of the dystopian hellhole it will continue to enable.

mab1223• 4 years ago

If they implemented it using only external tracking like cameras or actual people then I could be ok with it, but hell no trackers (or mandatory software) that I have no control of in MY car.

onpensionsterm• 4 years ago

The title is an incorrect editorialisation. This is not a government proposal, it's a committee proposal.

VBprogrammer4• 4 years ago

In fairness a telematic device wouldn't necessarily need to report exact times and locations. Only the summary of journeys within predefined categories / geofences etc.

Would I trust our government to implement this in a privacy preserving way? Not a chance.

outsidetheparty• 4 years ago

Do UK cars not have odometers?

OJFord• 4 years ago

Original title is:

All cars could be fitted with black box trackers under new tax plans

Maybe adding 'UK' somewhere is warranted, but not 'Gov': as others have pointed out, this is based on a report from a parliamentary select committee.

nick88msn• 4 years ago

In italy almost all new cars have a black box for insurance discounts. It helps avoid car accidents frauds that have been so frequent in the last 20 years here.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10657-020-09657-3

Mvandenbergh• 4 years ago

This isn't true.

The Transport Select Committee found that the loss of fuel duty from full electrification would need to be replaced by either a 5% rise in the base rate of income tax, or something else. Given that:

1) 5% on the base rate of income tax (in effect already 20% + 13.8%) is a big increase and that the 1.5%/3% increase in the national insurance component is already going to substantially increase the wage tax burden on many people so this may not be politically tractable.

2) If you wanted to recover it from higher rate tax payers, it would be a massive increase, a lot more than 5% this is probably also not feasible. (There are 27m basic rate taxpayers out of 32m taxpayers and only 4.1m higher rate taxpayers).

3) VAT ditto would have a catastrophic effect on the cost of basic goods, even more regressive than the NI increase.

4) People are already used to paying this money as part of owning a car so no "sticker shock"

The Select Committee therefore found that some kind of road pricing was the almost inevitable way of replaying fuel duty.

They did not say that this would require full tracking telematics, there are broadly a few different ways of doing this:

1) By far the simplest and most privacy preserving is a simple mileage counter with a flat rate. This means no data needs to leave the car.

2) A zoning / timing system operating on the car itself. This would allow simple congestion charging based on location and time of use without data leaving the car.

3) Fully dynamic charging system, this requires a central database tracking all movement.

I think a lot of transport economists would love 3 because they could make driving costs almost fully reflective of transport infrastructure costs - arguably someone who drives a light vehicle only at 3am imposes almost no load on the system while someone driving the same car, the same distance during the morning rush imposes a lot. It also allows the existing congestion charging infrastructure to be removed in London and the other places that are putting it in.

However people generally do not like this idea so I am almost sure that we will end up with either (1), (2), or those with an elective (3) that allows savings for people willing to disclose the data.

inter_netuser7• 4 years ago

plebs have no say in political matters. You will be getting #3, plus a full cavity search annually, guaranteed.

HPsquared4• 4 years ago

Cars are already taxed per mile according to weight and inefficiency, it's called fuel tax.

verdverm4• 4 years ago

The point is what to do when electric cars are the norm and there is no fuel tax to pay for road maintenance?

HPsquared4• 4 years ago

I suppose they'll have to get rid of "carrot and stick" and transition to "big stick and smaller stick".

d4nt• 4 years ago

A pay as you go model seems reasonable in principle, but the devil will be in the detail. In theory the information being gathered is public already. I could follow someone round the public highways if I wanted to. But having everyone’s movements in one big database obviously presents huge problems.

The UK has no written constitution, which has its advantages sometimes, but could be a problem here. What we have instead is institutions. So we must hope that one of them steps in and puts limits on how this can be used.

mytailorisrich4• 4 years ago

The key issue here is that over the years petrol and diesel have become cash cows for the government, which is now in a bind because of EVs.

Instead of jumping deeper into the rabbit hole with this slightly insane proposal perhaps the time has come to move tax income back to more sensible sources like income and corporate taxes.

There could also be a drastic increase of the road tax but obviously that would cause a political shitstorm.

dboreham• 4 years ago

Hmm. You tax fossil fuels heavily in Order to persuade people to use less and choose more environmentally friendly alternatives. They do that but now you're used to having the money so you tax the thing you wanted them to switch to..

bArray• 4 years ago

Who would have saw this coming? /s

I for one will not be installing a black box in my car, it's my right as a private individual to travel freely without informing the government about where I've been. I'll rip it out or put it in a lead box if I have to. I think COVID tracking has finally gone to their heads.

Another one to watch is green energy - it is currently heavily subsidized by fossil fuel taxes, so when everybody finally uses green energy they will lose tax income and the cost of green energy will increase for maintenance and future projects.

And as always, it is the poorest tax payers that ultimately pay the largest bills. They will be left with the largest road tax bill as they wait for a proper second-hand EV market to emerge, then will never see the tax break of owning an EV. They will be the last to adopt green energy, and will pay the most for it.

Politicians are completely removed from the decisions they make. In their mind everybody lives like a toff they rub shoulders with in central London. But, as they will learn, you can only push the working class so far. History is filled with peasant revolts.

kmlx2• 4 years ago

as written in a different comment, electric cars are very soon going to be the norm. and since they don't use any petrol during their usage, governments are trying to find out how to recoup that potentially lost tax revenue. one such way is via "tax per mile". whatever way they choose, i don't expect any government to simply give up on that tax revenue, as that will force them to either increase other taxes or explain to their voters that some state-funded services will have to close.

All cars could be fitted with black box trackers under new tax plans

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