TN will triple its dumb EV tax for inflation, but its gas tax lags inflation by ~5x
Tennessee has started the process of hiking its EV registration fee from $100 to $274 per year and beyond, aiming to continue hiking the fees in perpetuity, further increasing the disproportionately high taxes paid by EVs in the state as compared to gas cars.
We’ve covered many times before how misguided these taxes are, not least of which because they are the result of a cynical lobbying ploy by the oil industry to disadvantage a better transportation method.
Tennessee’s $100 fee was lower than that of many other states, but it still taxed EVs at a much higher rate than a similarly-efficient gas vehicle. For example, a ~140mpg gas car, if it existed, would pay ~$28 in gas taxes in a year if driven 15k miles, but a 140mpge EV, which there are multiple of, used to pay $100 even if it was low mileage. As a flat fee, it also adds a small disincentive for drivers to remain low mileage, which doesn’t help with congestion or road usage.
This year, Tennessee’s EV fee has doubled to $200 – but it’s not stopping there, with the state claiming that it will continue increasing to $274 in 2026, and then continue increasing beyond that along with inflation. Tennessee lawmakers and the Department of Transportation commissioner had asked to raise the fee to $300, which would have tripled the already-disproportionate fees that EVs pay.
But one big issue here is: inflation was not 100% last year, and won’t be 37% in the next two years. These hikes are well beyond inflation, on top of a fee that was already too high per the calculations above.
Not only that, but the gas tax has not been indexed to inflation in Tennessee. In fact, the gas tax has lagged inflation significantly, getting smaller over time in comparison to the value of a dollar. You can see a history of Tennessee gas taxes here, showing that drivers used to pay 7 cents per gallon in 1931, but only pay 26 cents now (plus a “1.4-cent special petroleum fee“). If gas taxes had kept up with inflation since then, they would be $1.42 per gallon – meaning they’re ~5.4x too low, compared to inflation.
But that’s because gas taxes didn’t go up for 50 years in Tennessee, until there was a measly 2 cent bump in 1981. Starting our calculations from that year, gas taxes are a lot closer to keeping up with inflation, but still should be about 20% higher than they currently are – and that’s without accounting for 2023’s inflation or the next few years’ worth which will be captured by this near-tripling of EV fees.
What’s worse, this year’s tax hikes were not well publicized, and many Tennessee EV drivers were left in shock with a doubling of fees from one year to the next.
If this trend keeps, then the gulf between TN’s gas tax and EV tax would continue to increase, becoming more and more unfair to EV drivers who already pay more than if they were driving a similarly-efficient gas vehicle, and much more than the amount of damage they’re doing.
The rationale for Tennessee’s tax is similar to those in other states – Tennessee is laboring under the misguided notion, propagated by Koch/fossil fuel industry propaganda, that electric vehicles don’t pay for roads. But in fact, the vehicles that are doing damage to roads also don’t pay for the damage they’re causing to roads – gas + license taxes only cover ~60% of Tennessee’s road costs, which means that fossil-powered vehicles are freeloading on at least a third of the road budget anyway.
And in actuality, virtually all road damage is done by diesel semi trucks anyway, not gas or electric cars, so road damage has little to do with passenger vehicles. An average EV does tens of thousands of times less damage to roads than a semi truck over the course of the year, so if a $274 fee is considered fair for an EV, then semi trucks should be paying registration fees in the millions of dollars – and if the latter sounds too high, then simple math means one must also acknowledge that the former is too high, if road damage is the main concern.
On top of this, gas taxes certainly don’t pay for the immense damage that burning gasoline causes, which cost society about $4 per gallon burned. The total cost of subsidies to dirty energy in America, a large portion of which goes to gasoline for motor vehicle use, was $760 billion in 2022. Few states even attempt to correct for this subsidy, with only a few having any sort of pollution pricing scheme. So gas vehicles are freeloading on our lungs even moreso than they’re freeloading on the roads.
The real solution, as ever, is to implement a drivetrain-agnostic road fee that takes into account weight and mileage, and another drivetrain-agnostic pollution fee to correct for the damage that each vehicle causes in pollution (these can be added to energy costs, tire costs, etc.). But instead, Tennessee would rather bow to fossil fuel propaganda and attempt to balance its entire road budget by overtaxing the 22,040 EVs in the state instead of implementing a long-term solution that might make gas cars (and diesel trucks) start paying their fair share.
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GE Vernova has produced over half the turbines needed for SunZia Wind, which will be the largest wind farm in the Western Hemisphere when it comes online in 2026.
GE Vernova has manufactured enough turbines at its Pensacola, Florida, factory to supply over 1.2 gigawatts (GW) of the turbines needed for the $5 billion, 2.4 GW SunZia Wind, a project milestone. The wind farm will be sited in Lincoln, Torrance, and San Miguel counties in New Mexico.
At a ribbon-cutting event for Pensacola’s new customer experience center, GE Vernova CEO Scott Strazik noted that since 2023, the company has invested around $70 million in the Pensacola factory.
The Pensacola investments are part of the announcement GE Vernova made in January that it will invest nearly $600 million in its US factories and facilities over the next two years to help meet the surging electricity demands globally. GE Vernova says it’s expecting its investments to create more than 1,500 new US jobs.
Vic Abate, CEO of GE Vernova Wind, said, “Our dedicated employees in Pensacola are working to address increasing energy demands for the US. The workhorse turbines manufactured at this world-class factory are engineered for reliability and scalability, ensuring our customers can meet growing energy demand.”
SunZia Wind and Transmission will create US history’s largest clean energy infrastructure project.
Read more: The largest clean energy project in US history closes $11B, starts full construction
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Jeremy Allaire, Co-Founder and CEO, Circle
David A. Grogan | CNBC
Circle, the company behind the USDC stablecoin, has filed for an initial public offering and plans to list on the New York Stock Exchange.
The prospectus, filed with the SEC on Tuesday, lays the groundwork for Circle’s long-anticipated entry into the public markets.
JPMorgan Chase and Citigroup are serving as lead underwriters, and the company is reportedly aiming for a valuation of up to $5 billion. It will trade under ticker symbol CRCL.
It marks Circle’s second attempt at going public. A prior merger with a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) collapsed in late 2022 amid regulatory challenges. Since then, Circle has made strategic moves to position itself closer to the heart of global finance, including the announcement last year that it would relocate its headquarters from Boston to One World Trade Center in New York.
Circle reported $1.68 billion in revenue and reserve income in 2024, up from $1.45 billion in 2023 and $772 million in 2022. The company reported net income last year of about $156 million., down from $268 million a year earlier.
A successful IPO would make Circle one of the most prominent pure-play crypto companies to list on a U.S. exchange. Coinbase went public through a direct listing in 2021 and has a market cap of about $44 billion.
Circle will be trying to hit the public markets at a volatile moment for tech stocks, with the Nasdaq having just wrapped up its steepest quarterly drop since 2022. The tech IPO market has been mostly dry for over three years, though there are signs of life. Online lender Klarna, digital health company Hinge Health and ticketing marketplace StubHub have all filed their prospectuses recently. Late last week, artificial intelligence infrastructure provider CoreWeave held the biggest IPO for a U.S. venture-backed tech company since 2021. But the company scaled back the offering and the stock had a disappointing first two days of trading before rebounding on Tuesday.
Circle is best known as the issuer of USD Coin (USDC), the world’s second-largest stablecoin by market capitalization.
Pegged one-to-one to the U.S. dollar and backed by cash and short-term Treasury securities, USDC has roughly $60 billion in circulation and makes up about 26% of the total market cap for stablecoins, behind Tether‘s 67% dominance. Its market cap has grown 36% this year, however, compared with Tether’s 5% growth.
The company’s push into public markets reflects a broader moment for the crypto industry, which is enjoying political favor under a more crypto-friendly U.S. administration. The stablecoin sector specifically has been ramping up as the industry gains confidence that the crypto market will get its first piece of U.S. legislation passed and implemented this year, focusing on stablecoins. President Donald Trump has said he hopes lawmakers will send stablecoin legislation to his desk before Congress’s August recess.
Stablecoins’ growth could have investment implications for crypto exchanges like Robinhood and Coinbase as they become a bigger part of crypto trading and cross-border transfers. Coinbase also has an agreement with Circle to share 50% of the revenue of its USDC stablecoin, and Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong said on the company’s most recent earnings call that it has a “stretch goal to make USDC the number 1 stablecoin.”
The stablecoin market has grown about 11% so far this year and about 47% in the past year, and has become a “systemically important” part of the crypto market, according to Bernstein. Historically, digital assets in this sector have been used for trading and as collateral in decentralized finance (DeFi), and crypto investors watch them closely for evidence of demand, liquidity and activity in the market.
After its meteoric rise in the global auto industry last year, the Chinese EV giant is off to a hot start in 2025. BYD sold over one million EVs and plug-in hybrids in the first three months of the year. Even more impressive, BYD’s overseas sales doubled to start the year as it expands into new markets. With new EVs arriving, some predict BYD could see even more growth this year.
BYD’s overseas sales are surging as new EVs arrive
BYD sold 377,420 new energy vehicles (NEVs) last month alone. Like most Chinese automakers, BYD reports NEV sales, including plug-in hybrids (PHEVs) and fully electric vehicles (EVs).
Of the 371,419 passenger vehicles BYD sold in March, 166,109 were EVs, and the other 205,310 were PHEVs. Combined, BYD’s sales were up 23% compared to last year.
BYD’s Dynasty and Ocean series accounted for 350,615, while its luxury Denza brand sold 12,620, Fang Cheng Bao had 8,051, and its ultra-luxury Yangwang brand sold another 133 models.
Through the first three months of 2025, BYD sold over one million (1,000,804) NEVs. That’s up 60% from the 626,263 sold in Q1 2024. Fully electric models accounted for 416,388 while PHEV sales reached 569,710, an increase of 39% and 76% from last year, respectively.
BYD’s overseas sales reached a new record last month, with 72,723 vehicles sold in markets outside of China. Through March, BYD has sold over 206,000 NEVs overseas, more than double (+110%) the number it sold last year.
BYD has made a name for itself with ultra-low-cost EVs like the Seagull, which starts at under $10,000 in China. In overseas markets, like Mexico, it’s sold as the Dolphin Mini and starts at around 358,800 pesos, or around $20,000.
The world’s largest EV maker is quickly expanding into new segments with pickup trucks, smart SUVs, luxury models, and electric supercars rolling out.
Last week, BYD launched the Yangwang U7, its first ultra-luxury electric sedan. With four electric motors, the U7 packs 1,287 horsepower, good for a 0 to 62 mph (0 to 100 km/h) sprint in just 2.9 seconds. It also has up to 720 km (447 miles) CLTC driving range.
The Porsche Panamera-size EV is loaded with BYD’s top-tier “God’s Eye” A advanced driving assistance system, DiPilot 600, and a host of other premium features. All of that, and it starts at just just 628,000 yuan ($87,700).
In Europe, BYD is aggressively expanding with new vehicles tailored to buyers in the region, like the Sealion 7 midsize SUV and Atto 2. It’s also expected to launch the low-cost Seagull EV in Europe later this year or early 2026 as the “Dolphin Surf.”
According to S&P Global Mobility, BYD’s sales are expected to double in Europe this year to around 186,000. By 2029, that number could reach 400,000 or more.
BYD outsold Honda and Nissan in 2024. As it aims to sell 5.5 million vehicles this year, BYD could be on track to surpass Ford in global sales this year. BYD also aims to sell over 800,000 EVs overseas in 2025, double the number it sold last year.
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