EV owners in Vermont recently received a letter from the Department of Motor Vehicles with some bad news. Starting Jan. 1, they would have to pay $178 a year to register their cars, twice as much as owners of vehicles with internal combustion engines.
By imposing a higher charge, Vermont became the latest state to make people pay a premium to drive electric. At least 39 states charge such annual fees, including $50 in Hawaii and $200 in Texas, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. This is more than in any state a few years ago.
Now that President Trump is rolling back the Biden administration’s measures to promote electric vehicles, Republicans in Congress are considering a national levy to bolster the fund used to finance roads and bridges, a fund that is in dire straits.
The fees are an attempt to compensate for the declining revenue from gasoline taxes, which electric cars, for obvious reasons, do not pay. They are an example of how governments are trying to adapt to technological upheavals in the automotive industry.
Environmentalists and consumer groups agree that electric vehicle owners should help pay for road maintenance and construction. But they fear that Republicans, who control Congress, would set the fee at an extremely high level to punish electric vehicle owners, who tend to be liberal.
That’s already happened in Texas and other states, said Chris Harto, a senior policy analyst at Consumer Reports who focuses on transportation and energy.
“EV owners should contribute to paying for the roads they use,” he said. However, he added that “in some cases, states impose fees that are quite punitive for electric car drivers, significantly more than what a gas vehicle owner would pay.
Flat rates are also unfair to low-income drivers or people who don’t drive much, making it even harder for them to buy cars that pollute less, Mr. Harto and others said. Federal and state taxes on gasoline and diesel are collected per gallon, so people who drive more — or own gas guzzlers — automatically pay more.
The main reason for the decline in fuel tax revenue is that internal combustion engines have become much more efficient, while political leaders have been reluctant to raise fuel taxes to keep up with inflation.
The federal gasoline tax of 18.4 cents a gallon has not been raised since 1993. The Highway Trust Fund, which finances transportation projects with revenue from the tax, could become insolvent by 2027 without new funding sources, analysts say. The list of tax and spending policies being considered by congressional Republicans includes imposing fees on electric vehicles to help replenish the highway trust fund.
According to the industry group Alliance for Automotive Innovation, there are 5.4 million electric vehicles on American roads. But that’s roughly 2 percent of the total, and it’s not the main cause of income gaps.
“Lawmakers are looking for a convenient scapegoat to penalize the cleanest vehicles on the road while ignoring the real cause of the shortage,” said Max Baumhefner, director of electric vehicle infrastructure at the Natural Resources Defense Council.
Some of the highest fees for electric vehicles are in states that tend to vote Republican, such as Texas, Wyoming and Ohio, all of which charge $200 a year on top of the regular registration fee.
Robert Nichols, a Republican Texas senator who sponsored legislation to introduce the fee in 2023, said the amount was determined by analyzing how much the average gasoline vehicle owner pays.
“It’s nothing against electric cars. We have Tesla right here in Texas and we’re very proud,” he said, referring to the electric car maker, which has headquarters and a factory in Austin. “But everyone has to pay their way.
Texas is among the states singled out by Consumer Reports for overcharging electric vehicle drivers. The organization cites Texas’ relatively low gas tax of 20 cents per gallon, well below the national average of about 50 cents.
Nichols acknowledged that lawmakers have been reluctant to raise taxes on gasoline drivers. “No one wants their tombstone to say, ‘She raised the gas tax,'” he said.
But fees for electric cars are not just a red state phenomenon. washington, which charges $150is as progressive as any blue state. And in Vermont, lawmakers passed a toll bill last year because of concerns that the growing number of electric vehicles posed a risk to state finances, said Patrick Murphy, director of state policy at the Vermont Agency of Transportation.
“Legislators have recognized that we are approaching a tipping point where EV adoption has become mainstream in Vermont,” he said.
Electric vehicles made up 12 percent of new car sales in Vermont last year, above the national average of 8 percent. Mr Murphy noted that fees collected from electric vehicle owners are earmarked for infrastructure such as chargers. At $89 a year on top of the standard registration fee, Vermont’s fee is also on the low end of what states charge.
People on both sides of the debate agree that a fairer system would charge EV owners per mile driven. But doing that is tricky. Some states are experimenting with technology that tracks mileage and charges owners accordingly. But the systems are expensive and raise privacy issues.
The flat fee “is not perfect,” acknowledged Mr. Nichols, the Texas lawmaker. “But it’s a big step forward. It’s fair without creating a huge bureaucracy.”
Some states, including Iowa, Georgia and Kentucky, tax electric vehicle chargers. But that system lacks a lot of cars. Most people charge at home, they only use public chargers occasionally.
Among the states that do not charge higher fees for electric cars are Alaska, Arizona, New York and Massachusetts, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.
In 2026, Vermont plans to be among the first states to try charging EV owners based on how much they drive.
That will be relatively easy in Vermont, Mr. Murphy said, because officials already collect odometer data when owners bring their cars in for annual safety inspections. In many states this is not the case.
Even the system that keeps track of kilometers driven has flaws. It taxes owners for trips to other states and does not collect revenue from out-of-state visitors.
“The whole approach we’ve had is to keep things as simple as possible in the beginning, get something to a place where all vehicles pay something for our infrastructure,” Mr Murphy said, “and then evolve over time to make it a fairer system.”