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A Prius is a $20,000 car (before the popularity markup), about the same as a Camry or Accord. An H2 is about a $50,000 car (also before popularity markup). So no, a Prius is not more expensive than a regular car, and emphatically not more expensive than an H2!

Also, 25 years old would mean cars made before 1980. I don't doubt that there's a lot of '85 - '95 cars on the road, which are also less safe and more polluting, but there can't be all that many 25+ year old cars -- they would either have to have been maintained well, or they would have fallen apart by now!

I wish taxes on gas were used for maintaining the roads. If they were, we wouldn't have the severe congestion that gives California such a bad name in terms of traffic.

Here's what's happening in a nutshell:

A group of people decided that they wanted to get Californians to start using public transportation and not use their cars for so many things. So they decided to stop building freeways, on the hypothesis that if there was no more room on the freeways, people would stop coming to California. This goes back to Gov. Jerry Brown, and the idea failed miserably.

Next, they decided to build carpool lanes, which would encourage people to, if not taking public transportation, at least get a few more people in the same car. Wrong again. They don't even have a decent state-wide model for carpool lanes: in SoCal, carpool lanes are carpool lanes 24 hours a day. In NorCal, carpool lanes are carpool lanes only during normal rush-hour traffic, and are normal lanes otherwise. Hence, some freeways have had their capacity increased by anywhere from 20% to 50%, and the lanes are not usable by the vast majority of drivers.

So then they jacked up gas tax rates, promising to build more freeways and add lanes to the congested parts (except then governors, Democrat and Republican, including Schwarzeneggar, started "borrowing" the funds from the gas tax to pay for general fund stuff, and the roads further deteriorated and failed to get expanded). The increases was also allegedly to encourage people to buy smaller vehicles that would be more fuel efficient and cause less wear and tear on the roads. Despite past measures that had largely failed because the California car culture is basically impossible to buck, people actually did buy newer, fuel-efficient cars (but still drive them alone), and gas tax revenues (and hence funding for pet projects that have nothing to do with the roads) went down.

So now they're in a corner. How do they get the taxes back? Why, based on mileage, of course! And with a GPS unit, they can also see when you go over the speed limit or perhaps lane change too often and send you automatic tickets or tax your auto insurance (who may also get a report on your driving habits and thus raise the rates on their own). This isn't part of the proposal *yet*, but I can imagine someone is thinking it.

They're also talking about watching when you're using certain high-use roads, and increase the tax based on congestion, so if you go to work on the 5 through Los Angeles or Orange County at 7:45am, then you get an extra tax because you're helping to cause slow traffic. You know what the really ironic thing is? The people behind this idea are almost exactly the same people who were yelling about how toll roads were going to punish the poor people who couldn't afford them, and now they've come up with a method to not only inflict what are essentially tolls, but to inflict them potentially on every single public road and street in the state.

(Wow, that's a big nutshell. I wonder if there's a walnut in there.)