London mayor: Self-driving cars? Not without jacked-up taxes, you don't!

Re: What about the downsides?

"This doesn't say "new tech is bad", but the opposite. New tech is good, but we need to make sure we don't lose tax revenue."

Yes. And more pertinently, not taxes for taxes' sake but specifically to fund road improvements and maintenance

Re: What about the downsides?

"A move towards new technologies like electric vehicles is likely to reduce taxation income for the government which could impact on the funding available for highway improvements"

Well thats what happens when you take the road tax, which is for building roads , and do something else with it , like turn it into a co2 tax

Re: What about the downsides?

I know you're being facetious, but I think the article is slightly harsh on Khan here. He doesn't appear to be opposing the new tech, but recognising that it's likely to lead to a loss of revenue, largely because it is better.

...

Seems perfectly reasonable.

Sure, but he seems to be presenting it a bit of an "OMG crisis" manner.

It's not rocket science. At one stage VED was based on engine size, at others CO2 emissions. Sooner or later it will just get changed again based on weight or something (i.e. if you get to the point where most cars are electric, you would either flat-rate them or separate on weight as a proxy for load/road wear).

Same for the Congestion Zone. Charges have varied for different classes of vehicle. When a shift in road usage becomes a problem, you change the tariff.

Crying "woe is us, who will build the roads?" is more than a tad melodramatic.

Re: What about the downsides?

We need to introduce electric vehicles as soon as possible and we need to install charging points all over London. I would have assumed that with such horrible air quality, we should have paid and subsidised EVs ... not tax it ! If you are in the country side you can have diesel and all but in Big cities the air and noise are horrible.

Re: What about the downsides?

"The "carbon emissions" are moved, not saved and may even increase due to grid losses, charging losses and battery losses"

Tank to wheel efficiency of most cars and busses is in the region of about 5% - less than 1% in stop start traffic.

Tank(furnace) to wheel efficiency of electric vehicles is around 35% and stop/start traffic makes little difference if they use regenerative braking.

The interesting part that goes with that is that the electricity cost of refining the fuel to run a car is about the same as charging an electric car.

Carbon emissions are a problem. Look up "Leptav Sea Methane Emissions" and then "Storegga slide" and then "Anoxic Oceanic Event". We're going to have to stop burning carbon sooner rather than later and not just for electricity (which only accounts for about 35% of carbon emissions).

This brings in some interesting problems:

1: To replace the other 65% of emissions (with electricity), you're going to need to increase electrical generation capacity by a factor of _AT LEAST_ 6, probably 8. Electric vehicle fleets alone will double the requirement at minimum, and replacing gas/oil heating systems will be as much again - which you CAN'T timeshift by much even with storage heating. Industrial processes will need considerably more electricity than a 1:1 reduction in carbon you might naively think, because a lot of it is making high quality heat.

2: Assuming perfect solar panels on every rooftop and windmills everywhere, renewables can _just match_ current electrical generation capacity (forget drax, it and its kin are greenwash which are destroying old growth forest at a prodigious rate)

3: Hydro is tapped out, tidal won't make enough different to matter. Electricity can only be economically transported about 1000-1200 miles before line losses and construction costs kill the feasibility of the project - less than 200 miles underwater (and underwater links top out around 2GW).

3a: That means "paving the desert" and using electrricity from there is a non-starter - for starters the deserts belong to african countries (colonialism writ large) and secondly the transmission lines _alone_ would be the largest engineering project in the history of humanity, with 75+% losses into Europe (No, superconducting cables are not practical. They need to be cooled and trenched, which is ok for 20 miles but not thousands)

4: If the developed world stopped using carbon tomorrow, the developing world has the capacity to make up the emissions and then some, whilst bootstrapping themselves to developed status.

The only logical path is nuclear and lots of it - to the tune of about 60 Hinkley points in the UK alone and deployment fo the same across the developing world.

By the time those reach midlife to end-of-life we (or rather the chinese, as they're the ones doing the lion's share of R&D) should have Molten Salt Reactors sorted and commercially viable. These are at least 100 times safer than current nuclear (which is already 300,000 times safer than coal) and break down conventional "nuclear waste"(*) - both the 99% viable stuff that comes out of a conventional reactor and the 90+% "depleted" uranium that's currently discarded after enrichment or turned into H-bomb casings/bullets, - leaving 1% waste output which is safe to handle in 100-300 years (5-10 for some byproducts, which are saleable commodities such as helium and other noble gasses. Anything "hot" or toxic goes back into the reactor melt pool for further breakdown)

(*) A conventional 800-1000MW reactor over a 60 year lifespan produces enough high level waste to fill a large swimming pool and is safe to handle for reprocessing in about 300 years (less if you wear gloves)

Ideally molten salt reactors will be ready long before conventional plants reach end of life, but we can't afford to sit around another 30 years waiting for them to be commercially viable and then 20 more to build the things. Carbon-emitting power plants need replacing now and we don't _have_ 50 years to sit around with our thumbs up our arses.

Yes, I'm aware that nuclear technology has drawbacks, but even with a worst case chernoybl event every decade(**) that'd be 50-60,000 deaths vs 500million or so if climate change gets bad and 2-3 billion if the atmosphere drops to 15-16% oxygen or less in the case of an Anoxic Event.

(**) The world's coal plants emit enough radium alone to equal the radiation output of several chernobyls each year. Making a fuss about nukes when that's going on is on par with panicking about plane crashes but not bothering to wear a seat belt when you're in the car.

Re: What about the downsides?

The "carbon emissions" are moved, not saved and may even increase due to grid losses, charging losses and battery losses. UNLESS you have most electricity sourced from non-fossil sources.

Which we do. It was in the news earlier this year that for the first time, at one point more than 50% of our electricity came from renewables....and that's only going to increase....

Re: What about the downsides?

IC engines are significantly worse in efficiency compared to thermal power stations, even after you account for grid losses etc.

Re: What about the downsides?

There are three types of fuel available for road vehicles; Petrol Diesel and Coal.

Re: What about the downsides?

"It does beg the question what will all the Uber / Cab drivers do once we have "Johnny Cabs"?"

From my extensive experiences with Uber I would guess for most it would be return to their country of origin?

" they could, you know, just stop maintaining the roads."

I thought they already had?

" alternatively, they could, you know, just stop maintaining the roads"

One of the problems here is that AFAIK the fuel tax, congestion charge, vehicle licensing fees etc go into the UK general budget, not int a pot reserved for road upgrades and maintenance. So what is spent on roads is far less than what road-related taxes bring in.

"Or alternatively, they could, you know, just stop maintaining the roads."

If motoring taxes were actually spent on roads we'd have superb roads. Taxes are taken from road users but not spent on roads.

Re: Khan being an idiot on this one

<blockquoteI don't think that's how it was intended.

If you read it as "this new tech is great, people will convert to it but that means we will lose revenue, so we need to change our tax systems," isn't that a perfectly reasonable thing for him to say?</blockquote>

Yes, it's a perfectly reasonable thing for him to say.

However, if that is what he's saying then he's being wilfully ignorant of the fact that the current low road taxes on EVs have always been intended to rise once EVs become mainstream.

Indeed, these changes are already happening -- the level of road tax is (partially) based on a vehicles' emissions, and the emission thresholds for getting lower tax rates have been going down steadily: cars that used to be taxed as low-emission have been pushed into higher bands and are no longer getting such a good tax rate as they used to.

The change is gradual, and not easy to notice as long as the headline is zero tax for pure electric vehicles, but that will change too eventually.

Re: Khan being an idiot on this one

What would actually be more reasonable to say would be 'I will live within my means and use the money I have wisely and intelligently, not just hold my hand out and demand more at gunpoint when I've spent everything inefficiently and recklessly'.

His tax income is falling, you either get more efficient, or simply stop wasting money on fatuous projects with no ROI, but as a typical socialist he believes that everyone works to pay taxes for his pet projects.

If he actually cared about the air quality, he'd be spearheading a campaign to reduce the the density of people in offices in London, stopping further development within the M25, & accepting the loss of tax income as acceptable to achieve real reductions in pollution within the M25, but that is clearly not his agenda, his agenda is clearly to prioritise increasing his tax income over everything else. I hope people remember this when the next mayoral election is held.