Wisconsin Hybrid Tax

These fees are annoying, but keep a couple things in mind:

** U.S. road taxes don't take pollution into consideration. These taxes are for road (and other transportation) construction and maintenance. Pollution control and remediation are handled by different agencies that don't tax cars.

** Because weight damage is proportional to the 4th power of axle loading, even heavy SUVs cause negligible weight damage on roads carrying 80,000 pound trucks. Family passenger vehicles really need to pay only their share of weathering, age, and congestion.

While my state does have a weight fee, everything up to 4,000 pounds falls into the lowest slot, a small portion of the annual fee. The next slot, to 6,000 pounds, pays slightly more. Those about 100,000 pounds pay real money!

 

Equal protection laws are at odds with charging a gas hybrid more registration fees (AKA a class action can and already has overturned these laws in 2 cases)
It can be easily shown that a substively the same gas econobox Only pays (at most) $20 a year more road tax on gas in most states, it’s also worth noting that state is barred from collecting “lost federal tax” unless the federal government decides otherwise.
This is an automatic fail in terms of being legal (feigned differences cannot be used to differentiate for taxes)
and no different than charging RED cars an extra $100

Sadly the Sierra Club that has a hand in overturning these successfully could CARE LESS about anything that burns gas and is genuinely disinterested in overturning the hybrid portion of the fees.

I would strongly recommend a physical letter to your representatives similar to bluesights letter.
Dozens of letters on a subject to a representative is like a landslide to the average politician, sadly few people message them constructively.

You can also place freedom of information act requests on how the state decides what constitutes a hybrid, in Wisconsin IHS Markit a partisan owned entity is paid to decide who pays and administer the tax earning income from it.
They have been shown to be unreliable and biased, with cases of identical cars paying different fees, because they are a private entity they are shielded from legal recoarse.

 

I missed that. Which states?

At the moment I only see that the Oklahoma Supreme Court overturned its hybrid tax because it violated bill passage rules for revenue measures.

In my state, a Prius driving 12k miles per year would be paying about $115 less in annual state-only gas taxes than does the average new light duty vehicle, more than our $75/year hybrid fee. Though the kicker is that that hybrid fee doesn't go to road maintenance, but instead to plug-in car infrastructure, which the hybrids can't use.