Aotearoa / New Zealand

As a recent EV and diesel owner, the current RUC system is dog shit.

But I’m not sure how they’re going to make it any better.

Allowing it to be post-paid when you do your WoF would just lead to a massive bill every year unless you stayed on top of it.

But what bills are the ones you don’t pay when you’re hard up? The optional ones. So that would stil impact the poorest despite “being fair”.

Unless they allow you to pay outstanding RUCs over the year, but I doubt that.

And neither of these options sound likely. The calls to “enable innovation” just sounds like a way to tack corporate fees onto a national tax.

@BaconWrappedEnigma , I think that overall a large portion of petrol driven cars will pay quite a bit more - the reason is that a huge amount of newer cars were bought because they consumed up to half the amount that older ones did, the huge number of small, fuel friendly cars on the road atm shows this trend - so it will be a win for the tax man.
I can see that this will result in less kms driven (a good thing for the environment where it involves petrol cars), this in turn will also mean less weekend outings, less holidays further afield, and in clear text another knockout for the industry depending on it and for business in general - I hope I'm not going to be right.

The main driving force behind this seems to be hybrids, both plug in and conventional.

It's very difficult to levy a plug in hybrid fairly, because part of their driving is on electricity, part is petrol, and the amount varies widely between vehicles, meaning with a set RUC rate, they are either getting stiffed or are freeloading, and no two are the same.

The fact that non plug in hybrids are so insanely efficient probably doesn't help either.

This is one of the few good ideas our govt has had, I think.

This seems like a reasonable move to me, not something they come out with often.

Road maintenace costs scale by weight and distance, not by fuel usage, so streamlining the purchase of RUC and shifting the point-of-tax entirely to a separate system rather than building it into petrol prices makes sense.

My only concern is that rather than keeping the shift fiscally neutral, they may use the restructuring as an opportunity to reduce the road-maintenace tax burden on vehicles and pull more from the general tax pool instead, thus incentivising greater private vehicle usage.

Gotta siphon more money out of the tax payers to pay the oligarchs