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…