A tax roadmap for electric cars | Letters
Rachel Reeves’s proposal to introduce a pay-per-mile tax levy on electric vehicles is idiotic, especially suggesting that hybrid vehicles will have a reduced rate and still pay the usual road tax (Rachel Reeves considering pay-per-mile tax for electric vehicles in budget, 6 November).Furthermore, requiring drivers to predict their yearly mileage in advance and then pay or reclaim the difference for actual mileage depending on whether they have underestimated or overestimated it is too cumbersome.If the DVLA is to oversee the collection/repayment system, it will undoubtedly need to recruit more staff or outsource the arrangement, with all the attendant pitfalls that would entail.The fairest way for the taxation of all motorists is to abolish the road tax and introduce a road toll system, as used on the Dartford crossing and the M6 toll road.Automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) would need to be an essential feature.
However, the use of an in-car dongle that is linked to either a credit card account or a dedicated debit account (which can be topped up when it reaches a critically low threshold level) would be the pay-as-you-drive element.Dongles could be renewed like the current road tax and preloaded.As vehicles become increasingly IT-sophisticated, the dongle function could be built into their “brains” but only be accessible to the authorised user via a secure password.In hire vehicles this could be governed by the hire period being programmed into the vehicle and automatically wiped on expiry.Paul F FaupelSomersham, Cambridgeshire Nils Pratley says “most EV drivers, one suspects, will see the fairness” in the pay-per-mile idea (Report, 6 November).
I do, but not at a flat 3p a mile.A few months ago I changed from a city car fuelled by petrol to a city electric car.I am very conscious that it weighs quite a lot more than my earlier car did – about 50% more.But by comparison with most electric cars it is light, and its wear on the roads is slight.If there is to be a tax on electric cars, then it should be progressive – according to car size.
Also, I do already pay a fuel tax.It’s called VAT on the electricity I draw from the grid each time I transfer “fuel” from my domestic supply.Venetia CaineGlastonbury, Somerset
Matthew McConaughey and Michael Caine sign voice deal with AI company
Oscar-winning actors Matthew McConaughey and Michael Caine have both signed a deal with the AI audio company ElevenLabs.The New York-based company can now create AI-generated versions of their voices as part of a bid to solve a “key ethical challenge” in the artificial intelligence industry’s alliance with Hollywood.McConaughey, who has also invested in the company and collaborated with it since 2022, will now allow ElevenLabs to translate his newsletter, Lyrics of Livin’, into a Spanish-language audio version using his voice.In a statement, the Dallas Buyers Club actor said he was “impressed” by ElevenLabs and wanted the partnership to help him “reach and connect with even more people”.ElevenLabs is also launching the Iconic Voices Marketplace, which will allow brands to partner with the company and use officially licensed celebrity voices for AI-generated usage
John Tymukas obituary
My brother-in-law John Tymukas, who has died aged 73, was a structural engineer on many of London’s infrastructure projects from the 1990s onwards, including Canning Town station, Heathrow Terminal 5, Glaxo Smithkline HQ and Crossrail Bond Street.Born in Adelaide, South Australia, John was the son of Kostas, a Lithuanian refugee and engineer, and Kathleen (nee Donohoe), the daughter of Irish emigrants and a former clerk. He was the eldest of six siblings. John completed his education in Brisbane at Downlands school and the Queensland Institute of Technology, where he took a four-year engineering degree course and worked in Australia before heading in 1990 to London to work on contracts with engineering companies such as SKB and WSP.An avid traveller, he covered Europe extensively, making contact with Lithuanian and Irish family members and discovering family history unknown in Australia until he made the links
ChatGPT violated copyright law by ‘learning’ from song lyrics, German court rules
A court in Munich has ruled that OpenAI’s chatbot ChatGPT violated German copyright laws by using hits from top-selling musicians to train its language models in what creative industry advocates described as a landmark European ruling.The Munich regional court sided in favour of Germany’s music rights society GEMA, which said ChatGPT had harvested protected lyrics by popular artists to “learn” from them.The collecting society GEMA, which manages the rights of composers, lyricists and music publishers and has approximately 100,000 members, filed the case against OpenAI in November 2024.The lawsuit was seen as a key European test case in a campaign to stop AI scraping of creative output. OpenAI can appeal against the decision
The race begins to make the world’s best self-driving cars
Hello, and welcome to TechScape. I’m your host, Blake Montgomery, writing to you from Barcelona, where my diet has transformed at least half my body into ham.We are on the verge of the global arrival of self-driving cars. Next year, major firms from both the US and China will deploy their robotaxis to metropolises around the world, in major expansions of their existing operations. These companies are posturing in the press like male birds fighting for the same mate; the dance sets the stage for the global competition to come
Datacenters meet resistance over environmental concerns as AI boom spreads in Latin America
This Q&A originally appeared as part of The Guardian’s TechScape newsletter. Sign up for this weekly newsletter here.The datacenters that power the artificial intelligence boom are beyond enormous. Their financials, their physical scale, and the amount of information contained within are so massive that the idea of stopping their construction can seem like opposing an avalanche in progress.Despite the scale and momentum of the explosion of datacenters, resistance is mounting in the United States, in the United Kingdom, and in Latin America, where datacenters have been built in some of the world’s driest areas
Can OpenAI keep pace with industry’s soaring costs?
It is the $1.4tn (£1.1tn) question. How can a loss-making startup such as OpenAI afford such a staggering spending commitment?Answer that positively and it will go a long way to easing investor concerns over bubble warnings in the artificial intelligence boom, from lofty tech company valuations to a mooted $3tn global spend on datacentres.The company behind ChatGPT needs a vast amount of computing power – or compute, in tech jargon – to train its models, produce their responses and build even more powerful systems in the future
The 5% first home buyers scheme is a miserable policy failure – and the latest chapter in Australia’s housing disgrace | Greg Jericho
SSE is a winner in the great grid upgrade. Who is looking out for consumers and small businesses? | Nils Pratley
Anthropic announces $50bn plan for datacenter construction in US
Waymo announces that its robotaxis will drive freeways for the first time
Reversed burger curse and ‘deep motivations’ may help Oscar Piastri turn Formula One season around
Sinner into last four of ATP Finals after straight-sets win over Zverev – as it happened