Chameleon Magazine

If you’re trying to kill off electric vehicle adoption while pretending to be green, take a page from New Zealand’s manual. Their shiny new “pay-per-mile” road charge for EVs has achieved what oil companies couldn’t: a total nosedive in electric car sales. The move was billed as “fair” and “future-focused” — and yet, shocker — the only thing it’s sparked is backlash, confusion, and a big fat warning label for Labour governments thinking of copying it.

🛣️ Road to Nowhere — Powered by Political Amnesia

Imagine this: you spend years encouraging people to go electric. You dangle subsidies, run climate ads, and guilt-trip drivers of 2010 Vauxhall Corsas. Then, just as people start switching, you slap them with a usage tax that makes owning an EV feel like a financial penalty for doing the right thing. Bravo. 🌱🔪

New Zealand called it a “Road User Charge.” But what it really said was: “Thanks for saving the planet — now pay up.”

The result? A dramatic plunge in electric vehicle sales, industry panic, and a public wondering if going green was just another bureaucratic trap.

And here’s where Labour should be sweating: the backlash isn’t coming from petrolheads. It’s coming from families, eco-conscious drivers, and middle-class voters who now feel duped into making an expensive, inconvenient, and suddenly-taxed decision.

If Britain’s Labour party even thinks about importing this genius plan, they should also be ready to import the fallout: dead EV sales, furious drivers, and the return of the Ford Fiesta as an act of protest. 🏁

Because nothing says “climate leadership” like strangling the electric car revolution with a red-tape ribbon marked “fairness.”

Is taxing electric cars into oblivion really “progressive”? Or is it a greenwashed cash grab dressed up as fairness?

Has the left forgotten how to implement actual incentives — or just learned how to sabotage them with spreadsheet logic?

👇 Sound off in the comments: Should EV owners pay mileage charges — or is this the dumbest U-turn since ULEZ?

The hottest takes will get featured in our next issue. Burn rubber, not the planet. 🌍🔥