Road Pricing Should Not Be Built On Trust

We break down the government’s EVED plan for a mileage-based charge from April 2028 and why the 3p per mile headline misses the real problem. We argue the proposed annual mileage guesswork invites fraud, creates hassle for drivers and fleets, and ignores connected car technology that could make pay per mile road charging fair and accurate. 

• the EVED timeline from consultation to draft legislation and what the government now plans 
• why 3p per mile is not the core argument 
• the annual odometer reading plus mileage estimate model and why it undermines “pay for what you use” 
• fraud incentives, enforcement costs, and the practical difficulty of proving intent 
• plug-in hybrids being charged on petrol miles already taxed through fuel duty and VAT 
• an over-the-air mileage reporting alternative using geofencing and internal self-auditing 
• privacy concerns compared with existing OTA data flows in modern vehicles 
• fleet admin burden, bulk estimates, and why automation matters most at scale 
• how friction and confusing naming could slow EV adoption more than price 
• why fuel duty already functions as pay per mile for petrol and diesel 
• the case for an independent oversight body to steer road pricing and wider EV transition decisions 

I'll show the links to my two previous podcasts on this subject in the show notes. Anyone interested in the oversight body and being part of it, please contact me at graham@grahamhilltraining.com
Previous Episodes On Road Pricing:

https://www.buzzsprout.com/2292487/episodes/18181999

https://www.buzzsprout.com/2292487/episodes/18320115

To buy the latest 2026 version of Electric Cars - The Truth Revealed, visit grahamhilltraining.com. If you buy a copy of the 2026 version, you will receive all updates through to the next release of the book. 

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Transcript

Hi Graham Hill here and I’m still creating a ruckus. The Government first announced eVED — electric Vehicle Excise Duty — at the Autumn Budget back in November 2025. Rachel Reeves stood up in the Commons and confirmed that from April 2028, electric and plug-in hybrid cars would start paying a mileage-based charge, because as more of us switch to electric, fuel duty receipts will drop away towards zero and the Treasury clearly needs something to replace this major loss of income.

After the Budget, the Government opened a public consultation over a period of sixteen weeks, running from the 26th November 2025 through to the 18th March 2026 asking for views on exactly how this should work in practice. They received over five thousand responses, in fact 5,133 to be precise. 92% of which were from individual members of the public, the rest was from businesses, trade bodies, academics and charities. Given the unexpectedly high number of responses the Government even used an AI-assisted analysis tool alongside their human reviewers, just to help them work through that many submissions and pull out the common themes.

In July 2026 they published their full response, alongside draft legislation for the next phase, the technical consultation. So, whilst it isn't quite carved in stone yet, it is, in practice, their considered position. Which I’m far from happy with and I’m going to explain why.

But first the good news which is the cost per mile. From April 2028, electric cars will pay 3p a mile whilst plug-in hybrids will pay 1.5 pence a mile. And that’s it, just 3 pence a mile is the figure. And that’s exactly what I proposed in a podcast and press release back in November of 2025, before the Treasury had published a single word of this. Was it a coincidence that we came up with the same figure? Possibly, but that’s not the point. It tells you that the rate was never really the argument. Nobody was arguing that the rate should be 3 pence or 5 pence. The fight was always going to be about how they easily determine the mileage for what could eventually be over 40million electric vehicles and how they collect the money whilst avoiding fraud and whilst not imposing massive costs onto the car drivers whether private or business and/or the DVLA.

And this is where the Government proposals fall apart.

So let me explain how the Government wants to do this, according to their findings. Once a year, when you renew your car tax, you tell the DVLA your current mileage read from your car’s odometer or as some refer to it as the mileometer on your dashboard or via your touchscreen. Then as daft as it may seem you are then asked to guess how many miles you think you'll drive over the next twelve months. Bear in mind that your guess will be used to generate the amount you’ll pay. They then charge you this amount, in advance, based on your guess. If you drive more than this estimate then you get a top-up bill. Drive less than the estimate and they carry the difference forward to the next year, because, and I promise I'm not making this up, their computer systems are too old to actually give you your money back. Well that’s what we’ve been told anyway. 

In the age of AI, that comes across as incredibly amateurish and frankly embarrassing as other countries are looking at our scheme as a potential model for road charging in their country. This is a tax that's supposed to be about fairness, about paying for exactly what you use, and it's going to run on guesswork, reconciled once a year against an odometer reading. And it gets worse. In order to deter fraud, the scheme will be backed up by a whole new set of criminal offences for tampering with your odometer, extra powers will be given to the police and the DVSA to pull you over for a roadside inspection, if it’s felt that fraudulent mileages have been submitted. And garages, up and down the country, will need to train staff and be accredited just to check the mileage reading on the dashboard or touchscreen.

And strip that back to what it actually is — one number, on a dashboard, checked against nothing else. Unlike my proposed method that has a built-in audit. The Government’s proposed method is genuinely easy to interfere with. And because there's nothing else in the system to compare it to, nobody catches it until an MOT, potentially months down the line, can be used as any sort of verification.

Let me give you a statistic, because this is important. Back in 2019, a study for The Insurance Factory checked mileage records across one million vehicles and found 6.94% showing signs the mileage had been wound back — over 60,000 vehicles, by an average of 70,000 miles each. Scale that up across the whole UK car parc and you're talking more than 2.4 million cars with mileage discrepancies. But here's the thing — that's the curse of data. As psychologist Rory Sutherland points out, that data only comes from one place and that’s the past. That clocking, as measured at the time, was on petrol and diesel cars for the old reason of a trader winding back the clock to bump up the resale price before flogging the car to an innocent buyer or through an auction. eVED is a different kettle of fish, it gives a brand new reason on top of the old one used by dodgy car dealers and traders, for drivers to adjust the car’s mileage and it's this reason that actually matters in the future. If tampering with one number both cuts your own annual tax bill and puts more money in your pocket when you sell the car, you've turned an occasional trader's fraud into something an ordinary owner has a direct, personal, recurring reason to do themselves. But it will be deemed illegal with all the damaging consequences to the person carrying out the crime. 

And here's the problem with catching offenders, a big drop in mileage from one year to the next has a dozen innocent explanations. You may have changed jobs, started cycling to work or used your bike more on short trips. You may have been ill or hospitalised for a few months and not been using the car. Maybe joined a car share group to save money. There could be lots of different reasons. There's no way to tell a genuine change in circumstances from a fabricated one just by looking at the numbers. And the Government hasn't even told us yet what actually happens once fraud is confirmed. Is it a fine, is it a court case, will your car be impounded, and will you end up with a fine, points on your licence and even a criminal record? And how do you prove a genuine mistake? All of this is still 'to be worked through', not yet decided. What is decided is that the DVSA, the DVLA and the police are going to have to spend time investigating this, at a moment when the same police force can barely keep up with burglaries, shoplifting and phone theft. Genuinely, how are they meant to find the time to chase down clocked odometers too? It’s ridiculous. An automated, cross-checked system sidesteps the whole question, because there's no single number left to fake in the first place.

The Government’s proposed scheme isn’t a modern tax system. This is a system built for 1993, with a very expensive old technology cost attached for all parties involved. Totally mystifying in these days of advanced AI.

And if you drive a plug-in hybrid, it gets worse

Here's one that doesn't get talked about enough. Plug-in hybrids get charged half the EV rate, 1.5p a mile instead of 3. Sounds reasonable on the face of it. But that halving is built on an assumption: that a typical PHEV driver splits their mileage roughly evenly between the battery and the petrol engine. But the research doesn't really back that up. Work by the Fraunhofer Institute has questioned that assumption as being far too generous. In the real world, plenty of plug-in hybrid owners barely use the plug at all.

Think about someone who doesn't have a home charger. Public charging for a plug-in hybrid is expensive and fiddly enough that a lot of owners in that position run the car for most of the time on just petrol, plugging in occasionally, if ever. Every single one of those petrol miles is already taxed, paying full fuel duty and full VAT, the same as anyone driving a conventional car. And under eVED, that same driver then gets charged the flat 1.5p a mile on top of that, across their entire annual mileage, as if half of it had been driven on cheap electricity from the grid. When, in reality, almost none of it was.

That's not really a mileage tax at that point. It's simply a flat surcharge, and it lands hardest on exactly the drivers who get the least benefit out of owning a plug-in hybrid in the first place. And again, what we call a connected car, already knows this. It knows, to the mile, how much of its driving was on the battery and how much was on the engine, because that split feeds the electronic trip computer's own efficiency numbers. An OTA or Over The Air system could charge eVED only on the miles that were genuinely electric, and leave the rest to fuel duty, which is already taxing those petrol miles perfectly accurately. That's a fairer way to do it than a flat rate built on an assumption that a lot of PHEV owners simply don't match.

So let’s move on to what I proposed instead

If you want the full detail you can go back and listen to the two episodes of my podcast on this subject last year, I’ll put the links into my show notes for this episodes, but here's a quick summary. Every electric car already has the technology built in to report its own mileage automatically, over the air, the same connection your phone uses and the car manufacturer uses to update your car’s software. No estimating. No annual guessing game. The car simply tells the DVLA how far it's gone in the UK. GPS geofencing quietly excludes any miles you drive abroad, and that's your bill, accurate to the mile, every single time. And you can be billed monthly, quarterly or annually in the same way that you may pay your mobile phone, gas or electric bill.

And here's the bit I'm most proud of. Because a modern EV already stores mileage data in several different places for completely unrelated reasons, battery management, servicing history, the telematics your insurer might already be using and possibly others I won’t mention. The car’s software can cross-check all of those against each other automatically, acting as an internal self-audit. If somebody interferes with one reading, it doesn't match the others, and the system flags it immediately. You don't need a police officer, or a suspicious MOT tester, or a new criminal offence on the statute book. The system polices itself. At a small cost it might be possible to include other fail safes within the software. Knowing how easy it would be to detect the clocking will inevitably stop drivers from doing so. Other fail safes could also be embedded in the car’s software. 

There's a side benefit too. Display your real-time mileage and running cost on the dashboard in front of the driver and you may start to see some changes to the miles drivers cover, the same way smart meters changed how people use electricity at home. People could naturally start cutting out journeys they didn't really need to make. Like switching the lights off when you walk out of each room in your house. 

A couple of people have asked me about the data side of this, where does the mileage actually go? There’s a simple answer: from the car manufacturer's own systems, straight to a secure DVLA database, the same body that already holds every driver's personal and vehicle records, and for the purposes of this tax, all it stores is your registration number, who's registered to the vehicle, the driver or the lessee, and a mileage total. No journey history. No location trail. No sensitive personal information. Something that seemed to be of great concern to the Government, and I understand that. 

I've had people suggest blockchain for this, and I get the idea, but honestly, blockchain is solving a different problem. It's for when several parties who don't trust each other need to agree on a record without a central referee. The DVLA already is the central referee here. A properly secured, cryptographically signed record on their database does the same job without the extra complexity of having to explain the workings of a blockchain.

Now, here's the bit that really got me

I went through the Government's own consultation response, line by line for this episode, and buried in there, I mean genuinely buried, you'd have to be looking for it, they admit that most modern cars already have this connectivity built in. Intimating OTA technology. They say they're going to develop an optional version of eVED that lets you use it. Optional. Some point in the future. Update to follow by the end of the year.

So, the Government has looked at this better option, my one, the one that doesn't need new fraud legislation, doesn't need police powers, doesn't need MOT garages retrained, doesn't leave fleets guessing mileages for thousands of vehicles at once and they've decided to launch the admin heavy version first and maybe, possibly, get around to the sensible version later. That's not caution. That's building the wrong house because the good bricks haven't arrived yet, when you're already holding the good bricks. Not a great example but you know what I mean!

And here's the thing that really doesn't add up for me. The reason they've given for keeping the connected version optional is privacy. Fair enough, as an instinct. But your car already gets over-the-air software updates all the time saving cost and garage time. They include things like infotainment patches, safety recalls, new monitoring systems, sat nav updates, in fact all sorts and that OTA connection is used all the time, with no optional-consent requirement attached, even though it can access a lot more than a mileage number including journey history, location, your phone pairing, how you drive and your taste in music. If privacy is a big enough worry to keep mileage reporting optional, it should be an even bigger worry for everything else already flowing through that same connection, without written authorisation from the driver and wholly unregulated. A system that only ever sends one number — total mileage — is actually the narrowest, least invasive use of that connection there is.

Now onto a quick word on fleets, because this one matters to a lot of you listening to this podcast.

If you're running a large fleet of electric vehicles, the consultation response is honest about one thing - that the initial method of reporting and collecting this mileage charge creates a genuine administrative burden. New processes, new software, in a lot of cases new staff, just to manage mileage estimates and compliance across hundreds of vehicles. The Government's fix is to let fleets submit estimates in bulk rather than actual readings. That's better than nothing, but it's still guesswork, just guesswork done at scale. And the thing the operators actually asked for, settling everything cleanly the moment a vehicle leaves the fleet, won’t be ready for the launch. It's been pushed into a future update, same as the connected-data option.

An OTA system doesn't have that problem, because there's nothing to estimate. Mileage reports itself, centrally, automatically, across the whole fleet at once.

And what about companies that have a pool of vehicles used by many drivers or daily rental companies renting cars out to a variety of drivers? The OTA solution makes life simple. Doesn’t matter who or how many people drive the cars, as far as the eVED is concerned it will simply collect a number at the end of each month for billing.

The real risk isn't cost — it's hassle

Here's something I don't think anyone's really talking about yet, and it's got nothing to do with price. Think about someone buying their first electric car, especially a used one, bought privately rather than through a dealer who walks you through the paperwork including mileage estimates and how to submit them. Now imagine their first experience of owning it, is an annual mileage guess, a possible top-up bill, and a small chance of a police-directed inspection if their numbers look off. And this is the first thing they run into after buying the car and taxing it.

And when you're choosing between an electric car and just sticking with the petrol car you already understand, that kind of friction is exactly the sort of thing that tips the decision away from electric. Nothing to do with the running costs at all. There are over thirty million vehicles on UK roads, and the whole direction of travel is towards nearly all of them being electric eventually. Something that's a minor irritation for a few hundred thousand early adopters becomes a genuine barrier once it's the default experience for tens of millions of ordinary drivers. It would be a real own goal if a tax designed to help fund the EV transition ended up quietly putting people off making the decision or nudging existing EV drivers back to petrol simply because it's less hassle. That risk doesn't seem to have crossed anyone's mind in Whitehall.

And what happens when the car is sold when the current owner has already paid for a whole year, say 10,000 miles but sold after 6 months into the eVED period and only travelled 4,000 miles? There must be a means to reclaim the overpayment at the time of sale as now happens with the road fund licence.   

And in answer to another question, no, I don't think this should extend to petrol and diesel cars.

I've had a few people say to me, and mentioned in the press, if EVs are getting a pay-per-mile tax, shouldn't petrol and diesel drivers get the same treatment for fairness? No. We already have that. It's called fuel duty, and it's had VAT sat on top of it for decades. Drive more in a petrol car, you burn more fuel, you pay more tax. Buy a more efficient car, you pay less for the same journey. That incentive to choose an efficient engine is baked into fuel duty already — a flat pence-per-mile charge doesn't replicate that at all. To their credit, the Government's proposals leave ICE cars out of this entirely. Good. Let’s leave it that way.

Let me actually put some numbers on this, because I think it puts what the Government is doing into perspective. Fuel duty right now sits at 52.9p a litre with petrol and diesel, taxed identically. Then VAT gets charged at 20% on top of the entire pump price, duty included, so you're genuinely paying tax on the tax. Add duty and VAT together, and at a typical pump price of around £1.50 a litre, you're looking at somewhere around 78p a litre going straight to the Treasury. That's roughly half of everything you spend at the pump.

Now turn that into pence per mile, because that's the number that actually matters for this comparison. Take a fairly ordinary family petrol car achieving an average of 37.5 miles to the gallon. Work through the duty and VAT on the fuel it burns to cover one mile, and you land at somewhere around 9.5p a mile in tax alone — before you've paid a single penny for the fuel itself. Drive something thirstier, say 30 miles to the gallon, and that climbs towards 12p a mile. Drive something more frugal, up around fifty to the gallon, and it drops to roughly 7p a mile.

Now compare that to 3p a mile for an electric car under eVED. Even the most efficient petrol car on the road today is still paying more than double, mile for mile, in duty and VAT, than an electric car will pay under this new duty charge. And don’t forget that VAT will not be charged on the 3p per mile at this point in time. And that's exactly the point the Treasury's own document makes — electric drivers will carry on paying a good deal less than the equivalent fuel duty a petrol or diesel driver pays. So next time someone tells you pay-per-mile should apply equally to petrol cars for fairness, the honest answer is: it already does, and electric drivers are still coming out well ahead. And there are still many commentators that claim that the 3p per mile will put people off transitioning to electric cars because of the additional cost. As I’ve proven, it won’t be because of the cost it will be about the inconvenience.    

Before moving on there’s one thing I should mention, and that’s the name given to the tax, because I think it matters more than it sounds like it should. Electric cars started paying ordinary road tax — VED, standard Vehicle Excise Duty — back in April 2025, after years of being exempt. Now the Government's named this brand new mileage charge 'electric Vehicle Excise Duty.' eVED. Put those two side by side and it's no wonder that almost everyone I talk to assumes eVED is just what VED has now become applied to electric cars, rather than a completely separate charge to replace the newly applied fuel duty. Now, this isn’t just a small detail. Every bit of extra confusion about what running an EV actually costs is one more reason for somebody on the fence to just stick with petrol. If you're trying to get people to switch, the last thing you want to do is confuse them about the bill. As those in selling will tell you, ‘A confused customer rarely buys.’ So for many people, calling the two taxes VED is confusing. Retain VED for what most of us know as road tax and is now payable on all vehicles but call the fuel duty replacement, eVED, something different. I suggested eTAX but as the money will be collected by the DVLA we couldn’t use tax because, as was explained, only Customs and Excise can collect tax. You couldn’t write it could you?

So where could this go, if anyone in Government is actually listening to this.

Once you've got a system that reports mileage automatically, the possibilities open up. You could band the rate by vehicle type — motorbike, car, van, all the way up to the big HGVs — though I'd want to be honest with you, push that too far on goods vehicles and you'll feel it in the price of your weekly shop, because that cost gets passed straight through to what's on the supermarket shelf. I should also add at this stage the eVED will only be charged on cars when launched, not commercial vehicles. You could charge more on the most congested roads at peak times, as a genuine incentive to travel differently. You could even let Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland set their own rate as you cross the border. None of that is needed for day one. But none of it is even possible under a system built around an annual guess.

And here's one for down the line. As I’ve just mentioned, commercial vehicles are exempt from eVED for now — vans, buses, coaches, HGVs — because their own move to electric is still catching up. That won't stay true forever, and when it changes, cross-border hauliers need a better deal than private drivers are currently getting. A UK electric lorry doing a run into Europe shouldn't be charged the UK rate for every mile it covers on the continent. Once you're already collecting mileage electronically, there's no reason that same system couldn't route payment to whichever country the lorry's actually driving through at the time. And honestly, the UK could lead on this — through GEVO, the kind of body I've proposed in my book, Electric Cars – The Truth Revealed — and help set the international standard, rather than waiting for someone else to write the rulebook first.

There’s a bigger picture in the UK than just pence per mile charging — and the reason why I keep coming back to a UK Oversight Body

This is really just one example of something I've been banging on about for a while now, and it's in the book if you want the full argument. Road pricing is exactly the kind of decision that shouldn't be made Governmental  department by department then patched together under pressure, with the sensible option, my option, filed away as 'maybe, possibly later.' We need a proper independent Oversight Body for the whole EV transition — not just road pricing. Realistic accreditation standards for the dealers selling these cars, not the half-hearted Electric Vehicle Approved accreditation introduced by the Government and now far from fit for purpose. There needs to be some serious thinking about the psychological barriers still stopping people from making the switch. The upstream-versus-downstream argument on our roads. Rather than re-surface or re-dress the roads we simply react to potholes by sending teams out to repair them once they become dangerous and costly to drivers. According to the Asphalt Industry Alliance, it’s up to 20 times less expensive over time to resurface roads than make constant reactive pothole repairs. Not to mention the irritation caused to local residents and the cost of repairs to drivers’ cars after hitting a pothole. Even dafter is that there is a group called the Pothole Partnership led by Edmund King, President of the AA. That’s just downstream thinking, we need to move upstream. Find a way to pay for a major road resurfacing programme. It’s bad enough taking this piecemeal approach to our roads, we're now about to do the same thing with road pricing — patch it now, rebuild it properly in a few years, and pay for the whole thing twice.

And there's tons more that the Oversight Body would need to address, whether some of these ultra-fast-accelerating electric cars really belong on public roads, especially given the poor condition of the roads leading to very little skid resistance from roads with tired surfaces full of uneven potholes. Then there’s the noise these cars make, or don't make. Are the current rules actually fit for purpose in busy built-up areas? All of it sits under one roof, with people who understand the whole transition, not just whoever's turn it is to carry the baton this year.

And, on top of all the detail we've gone through today, I’ve got many other worries about pence per mile recording of mileage — how suspected fraud actually gets investigated, how a driver with a genuinely faulty odometer gets treated fairly, what the penalties should really look like — that's exactly the kind of thing that needs its own sub-committee under that Oversight Body, working it out properly in advance. Not something Government figures out piecemeal after the tax has already gone live, which is exactly where we're headed right now.

So, to wrap up

I must first give credit where it's due. The Government listened to parts of this consultation. They dropped the plan for extra mileage checks on newer cars. They've kept the rate sensible. But they've built the launch version of this tax around the weaker of the two options they had sitting in front of them, and quietly parked the better one for later. That can’t be allowed to happen or we could be facing costs that exceed the income – and that is just dopey! I'll show the links to my two previous podcasts on this subject in the show notes. Anyone interested in the Oversight Body and being part of it please contact me at graham@grahamhilltraining.com For now, that's where I'll leave it. Same time next episode. Like me, keep making a ruckus!