Here’s everything you need to know about Hainan Province’s first collection of road maintenance fees for new energy vehicles

If new energy vehicles start charging tolls, would you still consider it?

Recently, Hainan Province announced that it will impose road maintenance fees on new energy vehicles starting from December 1 this year. This policy will adopt Beidou navigation technology and charge according to the actual mileage of the vehicle.

In terms of specific implementation, Hainan Province will charge road maintenance fees based on vehicle mileage. It is estimated that new energy vehicle owners who travel 15,000 kilometers per year may need to pay about 5,000 yuan.

Although this is only a local policy initiated by Hainan, it has also made many new energy vehicle owners feel nervous. After all, the main reason why many people buy new energy vehicles is that the cost of using the vehicle is lower than that of gasoline vehicles. The cost of using the vehicle here includes the fact that there is no need for road maintenance fees.

As the name suggests, road maintenance fees are the fees used for highway maintenance and repair. This charging item has always existed. After 2009, it was changed to a fuel surcharge, and the road maintenance fees were directly added to the oil price. For every tank of oil that car owners fill up, in addition to the oil money, they have to pay a certain percentage of taxes, including road maintenance fees.

New energy vehicles do not burn oil (various hybrid and range-extended vehicles actually burn oil), so this fee should not exist. Although many fuel car owners have complained about this in the past, considering that new energy vehicles are in the popularization stage and the industry needs more encouragement, while new energy car owners enjoy free road rights, the road maintenance fee has always been borne by fuel car owners.

However, as the penetration rate of new energy vehicles continues to increase and the number of fuel vehicles continues to decrease, the source of income from road maintenance fees has naturally decreased. This has directly led to increased financial pressure on road maintenance, and it is natural that the issue of road maintenance fees for new energy vehicles has been brought up again.

According to data from the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers, China's new energy vehicle production exceeded 10 million units per year for the first time, and it is also the first country in the world to reach an annual production of 10 million new energy vehicles. Relevant media have conducted statistical analysis and found that in October 2024, the penetration rate of new energy vehicles of mainstream domestic independent brands reached 74.6%; the penetration rate of new energy vehicles of joint venture brands was 6.2%; and the wholesale penetration rate of new energy passenger vehicles reached 50.1%, exceeding 50% for the first time, setting a record high for six consecutive months.

Taking Hainan, which is "taking the lead" this time, as an example, its new energy vehicle penetration rate in the first half of 2024 has reached 56.8%, ranking first in the country.

There are various signs that the number of new energy vehicles in China is now different from what it used to be. Based on the principle of "who uses it pays for it", sharing the cost of road maintenance with gasoline vehicles has become a problem that new energy vehicles have to face.

This trend has actually been evident for a long time, and many regions are trying to achieve "equal rights for oil and electricity" from different angles.

For example, measures such as canceling the green license plate for plug-in hybrid vehicles and withdrawing national subsidies for new energy vehicles in Shanghai are aimed at promoting new energy vehicles and fuel vehicles to assume the same obligations in terms of taxes and fees.

Balancing road maintenance costs and ensuring that all vehicles share the costs fairly are extremely necessary to create a fair market competition environment and promote the sustainable development of the automotive industry.

You should know that the Ministry of Transport had already expressed the country's pressure in this regard in 2016. In a media interview on the same day, Yang Chuantang, Minister of Transport, said that at present and in the future, my country's highway development will face a prominent contradiction between heavy construction tasks and rapidly increasing maintenance and management pressures.

By the end of the 13th Five-Year Plan, the mileage of national highways included in maintenance will historically approach 5 million kilometers. The highways built on a large scale in the 1990s and the rural roads built on a large scale around 2005 will enter a periodic maintenance peak period and will require concentrated major and medium-sized modifications and renovations. However, there is a huge gap in maintenance funds, and the funding gap for ordinary roads accounts for about 50%.

The prediction made many years ago finally came true.

In February 2024, Zhang Yuling from the Highway Research Institute of the Ministry of Transport published an article titled "Reflections on the Highway Maintenance Period Charging System" in the China Highway magazine. It pointed out that the annual maintenance and management funding gap for ordinary highways in the country is about 50%, and about 40% of ordinary highways are in the dilemma of "listed for maintenance but no money, and should be repaired but no money", and with the increase in highway mileage, the gap in highway maintenance funds is still likely to continue to expand.

Data provided by the Highway and Transportation Management Center of the Zhejiang Provincial Department of Transportation show that by the end of 2023, the length of ordinary provincial roads in Zhejiang province will increase from 3,500 kilometers to 9,000 kilometers. The newly added provincial roads can only guarantee the management and maintenance level of rural roads, and there is a funding gap of about 1.5 billion yuan.

Hainan, which was the first to impose road maintenance fees this time, has high costs for road construction itself. Coupled with the increasing penetration rate of new energy vehicles and the decreasing tax revenue from fuel vehicles, the financial pressure for highway construction and maintenance may really be "unbearable" if it does not find ways to increase revenue.

Although charging road maintenance fees for new energy vehicles has a positive effect on highway construction and maintenance, it is definitely not a good thing for new energy vehicle owners. I believe that many people have heard such rhetoric when buying new energy vehicles: low cost, no fuel vehicle fees...

It now seems that new energy vehicles will eventually have to return to the attribute of "car" as a means of transportation.

Previously, people said that charging costs were low, but later, the price of charging piles actually increased a lot. Some people even calculated that it was not much cheaper than fuel vehicles. If the road maintenance fee is levied nationwide this time, the cost of using new energy vehicles will be close to that of fuel vehicles.

In addition, will the use of Beidou satellites to assist in collecting road maintenance fees bring certain risks to personal privacy and increase other costs? Taking Hainan as an example, the Beidou system can only be installed to achieve accurate collection of fees, but it is not clear who will pay for this fee. If the car owners need to bear it, it will undoubtedly be another "heartbreaking" expense.

On the one hand, there is the necessity of road maintenance, and on the other hand, the cost of using new energy vehicles is increasing. As the first region to "take the lead", Hainan must be under great pressure.

At a time when new energy vehicles are still developing and have not really replaced fuel vehicles, we still don’t know whether Hainan’s road maintenance fee collection will work and whether it will be popularized nationwide. But one thing we can predict is that it is probably only a matter of time before new energy vehicles and fuel vehicles have equal rights.