Get ready to pay more!

Criminals use stolen cars and would just disable the GPS device. The only thing this will catch is you sneaking off to see your Ex GF.

RUC should be charged for boat, lawnmower, chainsaw etc, they generate plenty of harmful emissions as their emissions are not regulated. Every time my neighbor mows their lawn I can smell fumes in my living room because their mower runs so rich and poorly.

There are so many good electric power tools these days petrol tools should be phased out completely/

its already paid for with the petrol excise duty,I believe.Everytime you buy fuel for your lawnmower and boat (that you dont use on the road)the ped is included in the price of the fuel anyway.

I priced up an alarm with phone notification and GPS tracking for my car the other day, if an alarm system could remote shut down a vehicle, I doubt the average crim is going to be smart enough to defeat it, if they are to dumb to defeat it you will at least know where the car is.

RUC = Road User Charges which pays to build and maintain roading, nothing to do with emissions penalty.

I wonder if an alarm could be sent through the mobile network if a system with a remote battery back up, was found to be defeated like if being stolen and the car alarm is going off or if the owner tried to defeat it by cutting the aerial cable to avoid paying RUC then perhaps a back up mobile phone network alarm could be activated, there is some amazing tec. out there, I doubt it would be hard to outsmart some wannabegangsta who wants to steal a car to rob a shop for crakmunny.

Wouldn't be difficult for the discontinuation of signal to raise a warning and alert within the system but would need to be able to ignore situations where the car was out of satellite coverage such as covered storage or the likes.

Im guessing such a system would need to tie into an alarm so it can tell if the signal loss is from vehicle storage, theft or defeat.
A truck I drove about 15 years ago had an emergency alarm that would notify the company bosses phone with the push of a button, should you be hijacked, road raged or crash/breakdown outside mobile coverage, a silent emergency signal could be sent, with the push of a button. Its not hard to see ways crims could still be caught. even if they cut the GPS wires, even then they would need to figure out how to take the car when everything electrical could be shut down if theft or defeat is detected in such a system.

By taxing fuel efficient cars even more? They still use fuel.

Mean while, i have 3 cars, WOF & rego, all paid for, but i can only drive one at a time.

surely a better incentive would be to lower taxes on fuel used by transport prime movers, in doing so reducing the cost of everything we buy and that money would mean people could afford to buy more fuel efficient vehicles, Tax is an evil weapon with the money wasted by dreaming bureaucrats in a top heavy dictatorship.
how about the people in this country that are so unproductive they actually pollute by even existing as its all take and burn with no profit - they eat food, consume O2, need heat and energy BUT provide absolutely no return except to provide work for a few welfare and KFC workers.

It's just one option under consideration for review. Reviews should consider every viable option.

Currently we have petrol tax & RUC's on diesel vehicles. It works, but taxing one fuel by liter and another by km is highly distorting.

By luck this saved us from europes urban air quality issues as we didn't get many small diesel cars in NZ. Also acts as a strong incentive to get a economical car (if shopping for a petrol one).

Means something like a yaris hybrid will pay 1/3rd the road tax as a vw polo bluemotion diesel, despite both being very low fuel consumption vehciles.

And at the other end of the spectrum, a Nissan patrol Y62 v8 petrol towing a 2650kg carvan will pay something like triple the road tax of a LC200 v8 diesel towing the same caravan. Despite both vehicles using roughly the same amount of fuel 23.7L/100km vs 23.5L/100km according to carsguide.com.au.

And of course the status quo where recreational (petrol engine) boaties, and other non commercial petrol users (generators, lawnmowers etc), aren't eligible to claim back road tax is grossly unfair.

The big issue to rear it's head is how to phase back in some kind of road tax on EV's. Currently their RUC exemption runs out at the end of the year. I fully expect this to be extended, but as EV's go mainstream it will need to be re-appied somehow. Current research indicates purchase subsidies for EV's are more effective to encourage growth than ongoing running cost discounts.

But, if RUC's are applied to EV's at the end of the year, a yaris hybrid will be paying 1/3rd the road tax of a mini electric. Encouraging exactly the opposite behavior to what we want. Also current rules would allow Plug in hybrids to claim back their petrol tax once RUC's come on. this would generate an epic amount of paperwork if PHEV's become really common, and be prone to defrauding (run your phev mostly on electricity, but claim back tax from petrol tax used in another vehicle so it looks like the phev was mostly run on petrol).

A discounted RUC rate for EV's was mooted, but that would breach the basic principal that RUC's should pay for road upkeep, scaled by damage that a vehicle does.

Easy option would be to just scrap the road user component of petrol charges, and do ODO based RUC's on all vehicle's. Arguably fairest, given the road use or damage don't vary by fuel type. Downside is it is fraud prone (ODO tampering), and one more task for every petrol vehicle owner to do. Would be controversial. The cost of running a prius would be going way up, while the cost of running a V8 would come way down. Taxi industry & environmentalists would be pissed. (But we do already have an emissions charge on petrol & diesel that wouldn't be going away.)

Going for a GPS based system big selling point is being able to set congestion charges. i.e. drive from Upper hut to wellington CBD at 2am: Token per km charge (say 3c/km). Do the same trip at 7:30am on a weekday: $7 congestion charge.

Basically this could "solve" congesting, giving massive advantage. Huge time savings for anybody traveling, no clogged roads slowing down emergency services, no need for bus lanes anymore (can make all lanes general lanes or change bus lanes to bike lanes), less emissions are car's aren't idling in traffic. Trucks / taxi's can do more work in the same time so less of them needed etc.

But effectively this will price the poor off the roads at peak time's. so will be very controversial. (but for many the congestion charges will be great value). Not sure if a NZ government will have the balls to go through with this despite the potential gain.

There is strong feeling on here about privacy, but I am surprised by this. I don't have an expectation of privacy when I go for a drive. Camera's (incl number plate recognition) covering roads are very common at the moment.

No this will just increase the cost to the large proportion of the population who cant afford EV Bit like the dick heads who thought increasing registration costs for older cars would make the roads safer by penalizing those who could least afford it.

s_nz covers it well.

Will have to be something done as the number of light passenger vehicles that don't use fossil fuels increases. They need to contribute to road upkeep somehow.

Automatic number plate recognition systems (ANPR) are getting very cheap and easy these days so people worried about privacy should consider that they are driving around with number plates showing and there are hundreds if not thousands of locations already doing ANPR. Every Z, BP station etc does lookup and knows if the rego is out of date or car is stolen/reported as being used in drive off. BTW - if you always have to pre-pay, check your car rego sometime.

Even more obvious is that the phone that most people carry already tracks all movement; even a dumb phone can be tracked by proximity to cellphone towers.

I suspect the right answer will be to keep tax on fuel as you don't want to encourage more fuel being used, but maybe car registration is online and scaled on vehicle kilometres driven. Could be good for people with a bunch of vehicles that don't do many kilometres per year. Could be opt in as well; but they tie it to ANCP so if your vehicle is logged as being somewhere without travel being automatically logged you get a 'please explain' letter

Congestion charging is obvious potential win; we have plenty of road capacity - just try and compare driving in school holidays or at night compared with peak times like holiday weekend travel. It's just that roads don't cope with everybody trying to use them at once

this could also be used for toll roads.
if the collection system is built into the cars then no need for the very expensive collection system they have now (most of the toll money goes to system admin).

as its automatic, this could really open up the door for private road building anywhere in the country.

This is where a tinfoil hat might be useful.

So you want to sell more of the country to chinamen?

Not sure if your RUC will work, haven’t seen too many chainsaws and lawnmowers driving along the Road, likewise the only boats I’ve seen on the Road were on a trailer.

Do you think it might end up forcing people out of cars and onto bikes? That happened to us a couple of years ago when petrol went up to $2.50+ a litre. We don't drive much now.

nah. For a lot of people a bike is only something they might ride on their day off. Work is too far away, the hours are unfriendly, they're not confident on the road, they don't want to have to ride to work in the rain, wind, fog, sun, you name it.

Hubby for instance works 15Km from home. He's NEVER going to cycle to work because while he is very confident on a bike it's further than is practical, (especially since he's on call at times and has to get there quickly), so it's not practical. And I'm not going to cycle to work as it's a hassle when you have bad weather and I'm not that confident on the road.

The sooner it is done the better. National wanted do do it years ago but the left blocked the idea on privacy grounds. This can only get done under a government whose supporters will forgive anything they do, a bit like the TPP for example. Not a criticism of the current government but success is all about timing and the timing is right to get this important road funding right.

You can be assured the tax collected will be more for an ice car than an EV no matter what collection method is used. Up north here about every third diesel car has the speedo disconnected or is on a b rego to avoid the road tax as it is so why not get a fairer system.

Promoting fuel efficient cars will slow the transition to EV so you can bet they do not want to do that.

Only if they remove tax at source.

I bet they leave a carbon tax on fuel.

this is what happens when a bunch of people who want to control the climate manage to convince the idiots running the farm that their ideas are the only way forward. the farm managers cannot think for themselves and now we suffer especially when it goes wrong and it will as no one cares enough to present the down side of the BS.