Four years ago, Texas legislators asked the Texas Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) to study and recommend a fair electric vehicles (EV) tax that would hit EV drivers no harder than the gas tax hits drivers of conventional cars and trucks.

About 29% of the money that pays for road building and repairs in Texas comes from the gas tax — which, of course, EV owners don't pay.

The DMV put forward a study suggesting roughly $100 would more than cover EV owners’ fair share of the state’s road responsibilities: “If the objective is to replace the average amount of state motor fuel tax that an equivalent conventional vehicle pays, the amount is estimated to be about $100 a year for an electric vehicle” (p. 6).

The legislature, in turn, ignored the study it commissioned. The Senate passed a $200 EV tax instead, which died in the House in the waning days of the last session. So legislators are back at it — the Senate passed the $200 tax again just this week. An identical bill (HB 2199) will be heard in the House Committee on Transportation on Wednesday.

To be clear, drivers of trucks that get ~20 miles per gallon (mpg) end up paying about $108 per year in state gas taxes, according to Texas Transportation Institute (TTI). Sedans pay, according to the DMV, $63.27 a year.

Texas leaders apparently think EV drivers — regardless of what model they drive — should be taxed at twice the highest rate in Texas and should pay more than three times the tax paid by drivers of conventional cars…

Within about four years, the total electricity stored in electric vehicles in Texas will equal the entire capacity of the ERCOT power grid.

Electric vehicles are now one out of every eight cars purchased in the world and about one in 20 in Texas. More than 179,000 Texans now own electric vehicles. And EVs have an average battery capacity of 67kWh. So right now, at the very dawn of this boom, Texans now have 12,000 megawatts of power sitting in their garages. That’s enough to power the entire Houston area for an hour.