Oklahoma Electric Vehicle Owners Rage Against Paying Road Tax

One of the many selling points of electric vehicles is the long-term cost-savings over a traditional petroleum-powered car or truck. You fill up with much cheaper electricity and skip the pump altogether, but it's not just a savings per mile on the fuel, you'd be saving on use and road taxes too... or that's how it used to be.

If you drive an EV registered and tagged here in Oklahoma, there's a new charge that appears when you renew your vehicle's license tag, and it has some drivers fuming.

In order to collect a fair and similar use and road tax that is normally folded into the price of gasoline and diesel, the state is adding an additional $110 flat rate to the tag renewal of all fully-electric vehicles in Oklahoma.

Obviously, if you were used to paying your $86 to renew your tag each year and you suddenly got hit with an additional $110 tax fee for choosing your trendy electric vehicle for whatever reason you did, you probably wouldn't be too happy about it either... but the rage some EV owners are tossing at our state legislators is uncalled for.

Does it suck? Sure... But it's also fair.

In Oklahoma, the price of every gallon of gasoline and diesel includes the standard 19¢ road tax. These are tax revenues that are supposed to be used to upkeep our state's roads and highways. I'm sure there's also a disbursement to local governments too, but I can't find the stats on that at the moment, but I digress... If your vehicle doesn't run on gas or diesel, you're not paying the taxes to upkeep the roads you use to get from point A to B.

It had me curious how expensive $110 in road taxes actually is, so I did the math with my own vehicle.

Based on my yearly average mileage, I will have purchased about a thousand gallons of gasoline every time my birthday swings around. Doing the quick and simple math, I pay about $190 a year in road taxes.

I understand that the average vehicle most likely gets much better mileage that my power wagon, so I also did the math on our most efficient vehicle, the 1073PopCrush Kia box car thing. It gets great gas mileage. If I were to drive it the same amount of miles per year, based on that 24mpg average, the road tax per gallon paid would be just shy of $119.

I think the more boisterous EV owners that are seriously mad about this are overreacting a little bit at the suggestion that they should pay the same taxes as petroleum vehicles. There are no special-class citizens, we all share the same roads, we all must pay for the privilege. After all, $110 per year, in the grand scheme of things, seems to be one of the cheapest options.