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Rural drivers to face steepest bills under UK’s mileage-based electric vehicle tax
(www.theguardian.com)
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this post was submitted on 18 Feb 2026
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What about anyone that drives abroad? You would accrue English road tax for driving on french or Irish roads!
You would pay UK duty if you drove on Irish roads with a fuel tank filled in the UK.
With this, you would potentially be double(or triple if you include road tax itself) dipping on tax though. You would be paying for milage + Irish tax on 'fuel' when filling up in Ireland.
With petrol, you would be paying Irish tax filling up & driving there, not both.
Maybe an offline GPS ringfenced mileage tracker to be reported at MOT. Only counts UK mileage, and tough to cheat.
I can see that causing a proliferation of illegal GPS jammers.
..... And lots of stories about the government having gos trackers in all electric cars
Then opt-out of the tracker and pay based on raw odometer readings.
This is a bit of red herring. From the POV of the driver of a petrol car, you're paying tax to someone - it doesn't matter who - you're still paying fuel duty. If you don't refuel abroad, you paid all the fuel duty in the UK. If you did refuel abroad, you're not exempt from the fuel duty abroad, you still pay someone for fuel duty even if it's not the UK - so from your point of view, you're still paying roughly the same to someone (taxes on fuel aren't that grossly different between countries a British driver may drive in).
So a mileage tax on electric cars, then you're no worse off than the petrol car driver, you're paying tax to someone, you don't care who is running up the additional cost you have to pay, you're still paying it. If significant miles are driven by UK drivers in France (e.g. a significant imbalance between how much UK drivers drive in France compared to French drivers driving in the UK) then the French and British governments can decide how that gets divvied up after they have received the tax money from their respective drivers without involving the driver themselves. If in reality UK drivers drive in France about as much as French drivers drive in the UK, then really there's no need to worry about it.
If, hypothetically, France put a tax on electricity from fast chargers for example - you would be double paying that milage.