This feels like a post-hoc rationalization to me. I drive a Tesla and I do often find the breaks annoying. I would prefer to drive straight through rather than stand in some random parking lot for 30 minutes. Even if I want a break, I’d prefer to find a park or something. You can take a break whenever you want with any car, the car doesn’t need to force you.
Are the breaks annoying enough you'd go back to a gas car if you had to pay the fully loaded carbon costs per gallon of fuel? At ~$100/metric ton of CO2, that's about 90 cents of carbon tax alone per gallon of fuel.
Current U.K. price is $1.60 a litre or $5.60 per us gallon. That’s significantly more than current US gas prices and people still buy petrol cars. I don’t see a 90c/gallon charge impacting much.
Absolutely not, it’s minor. For me it’s not really a financial decision, it’s about driving a very nice and practical ev with much lower lifetime emissions than a gas car. Also most of my driving is local.
> that's about 90 cents of carbon tax alone per gallon of fuel.
Right now european gas prices range from 1.2 to 1.6 euros per liter depending on the country (eastern europe tends to be cheaper and western more expensive). And that's for 95, 98 tends to be a few cents higher.
That's 5.3 to 7.1 USD/gal. 90c/gal would be a significant but at the end relatively minor increase: it's less than the increase in gas prices since the start of 2021.
As long as you use taxes to internalize the cost of those emissions for people who don't want to wait an extra 15 minutes to refuel (and those funds go into air source carbon removal), that's a fine solution. At the rate at which EVs are selling [1], it seems the wait is not an impediment to ownership. It's important those who don't want to wait (and require liquid fuels because of that) don't put that burden (carbon emissions that aren't paid for) on everyone else collectively.
... or you incentivize the wait by decreasing cost.
Sometimes I feel like these discussions about EVs are strangely divorced from most people's lives. We will likely make our next purchase an EV purchase, and I think the cost of waiting on long trips probably has to be considered against other annoyances of ICEs, but the economics of this are a major reason more people don't switch to EVs. Even the cheapest ones still cant compete against the ICE market as a whole, especially when you consider the used vehicles that will be in circulation for some time.
Adding costs will just make it more difficult for people to afford anything.
If people want EVs to take off, they need to incentivize purchasing them, not tax the ubiquitous alternative. If the carbon costs are real, manifest it in decreased costs for the alternative. Otherwise it's all theory.
