Think Driving an Electric Car Is Cheaper Than Gas? Think Again
Led by President Joe Biden, the left has launched an all-out effort to cajole Americans into buying electric vehicles under the claim that they offer a cost benefit for drivers.
But some EV drivers have discovered that governments have no intention of letting them enjoy their cost savings scot-free and massive new taxes await them after the switch.
The Biden administration has been pushing electric vehicles since his first days in office, and now that Biden’s disastrous energy policies have sent gasoline skyrocketing towards — and often over — $5 per gallon, claims that EVs are cheaper have convinced many Americans to “do the right thing” and buy a hybrid or electric vehicle.
But there is one warning about going electric that many have not heeded: As The Western Journal has noted, our various governments, local, state and federal, tax each gallon of gasoline, claiming that those tax dollars are needed to build and repair infrastructure, including roads.
But if Americans are going electric and no longer buying gas and therefore not paying the tax, it won’t just disappear. It will morph into a new tax. And taxes don’t generally make lateral moves. They always go up, rarely down.
Now, more than 30 states have already begun adding new taxes to their books tailored just for hybrid and electric car owners, to make up for the loss in gasoline tax revenue. And EV drivers are being struck with a brand new version of buyer’s remorse.
Kentucky for instance, is set to double the registration fees for hybrids and EVs because gas taxes won’t effect them, WPTV noted Friday.
Kentucky isn’t alone. At least 30 states have already enacted new taxes or raised fees on hybrid and electric vehicle owners, and 12 more were in the early stages of doing the same, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.
“One growing policy trend is applying a separate registration fee for certain hybrid or electric vehicles. These fees come in addition to standard motor vehicle registration fees and proponents support the fees to bring equity among drivers by ensuring all drivers pay for using roadways,” the NCSL wrote late last year.
Other ways our various governments are considering to make up for the lost gas taxes is to charge taxes at charging stations, add higher fees to home electric bills, and even resorting to charging a per-mile vehicle tax.
Jack Marchbank, Ohio’s Director of Transportation, gave the familiar line that it isn’t fair to expect drivers of gas-powered vehicles to bear the brunt of road taxes while EV drivers get off scot-free.
“Up until this point if you were driving an EV or a hybrid to the extent that you are not using gasoline you were not helping support the system on which you depend,” Marchbank told WPTV.
While he certainly had a point, it will be a shock to EV drivers who go into their purchase imagining that they’ll be saving money only to find their fees skyrocketing even as they face brand new taxes.
The new registration fees range from $50 per year in Colorado, to a whopping $225 per year over the registration fees for of gas-powered cars in Hawaii. But, as is the habit of government, these taxes will continue to rise even as new taxes to replace the gas tax are devised.
But a raft of new taxes are not the only hidden costs to buying an electric vehicle.
In March, for instance, it was estimated that the price of lithium needed for EV batteries had soared 472 percent year-over-year.
Worse, a Ford Motors executive recently noted that the world doesn’t even have the resources and supply chain to push the bulk of Americans into EVs.
After Ford reported that it had lost $3.1 billion on its electric car gamble, Ford’s EV CEO RJ Scaringe noted that the world simply can’t meet the demand for EV battery packs.
“Put very simply, all the world’s cell production combined represents well under 10% of what we will need in 10 years,” Scaringe said last week, according to the Wall Street Journal. “Meaning, 90% to 95% of the supply chain does not exist.”
There is also the increasing costs of charging an EV to consider. It costs up to $2,000 to install a charging station in your home, according to Carvana. EV drivers will also have higher monthly home electric bills, too. And that isn’t even to mention the greater demand on the nation’s already delicate power grid to feed those power-hungry cars.
Repairs are also more costly on EVs than on gas-powered cars, according to Road Show News. The EV market is still so new that parts are more costly, and so are labor costs. Add in the fact that only a select few mechanics are even trained to repair EVs, and drivers will find the selection of repair shops fewer and farther between, and the labor costs higher due to supply and demand.
Presumably, this would even out in the coming years, but right now it is a costly concern.
All these hidden costs will cause many hybrid and electric vehicle owners to blanch at costs they never knew they were getting themselves in for when they heeded Joe Biden’s advice to go electric.
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