The Governor of Oregon says his state needs to wake up to the downside of high-efficiency automobile engines. With cars getting more MPG, they won’t use as much gas. You thought that was a good thing? Not if you rely on gas taxes to pay the bills.

So instead the idea is to go to a mileage tax. As explained in a Corvallis newspaper, the system would work like this. Cars would have global positioning systems, which would be used not to track their locations but to log their mileage. At the gas station, the mileage would get uploaded and (during the transition period) you’d get a rebate on the gas tax.¬†Eventually the system would become universal, and automakers would build the GPS into the car.

Supposedly this kludge protects privacy, but of course it doesn’t — the state would know the exact dates, times, and locations of every fill-up. And how long do you think it would take before law enforcement, the insurance industry, or Homeland Security would find it “essential” to collect and upload just a bit more information about vehicular movements?

In any case, why not just have motor vehicle inspection stations report the odometer reading when cars are inspected? In Massachusetts that happens annually, and the odometer reading is one of the data that is taken down. This plan sounds very fishy to me.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 30th, 2008 at 6:19 pm and is filed under Miscellaneous, Privacy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.