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Tuesday, August 25, 2015

EVs Soon Welcome to Oregon Mileage Tax

One of my fellow EV drivers received an invitation to the Oregon Mileage Tax program. When he explained that the only vehicle that he owned was an electric Nissan Leaf, here is the response from the OReGO program:
It is true that we cannot just yet enroll a Leaf in OReGO, but we hope to be able to do that very soon! Our account managers are working very fast on the technology that will allow EVs to participate, particularly your Leaf. Because, you are right! It would be decidedly “un-Oregonian” not to have EVs in this innovative program. Please stay with us a little longer; we hope to have an announcement soon opening up OReGO to one or more electric vehicle models. When that happens, you could be one of the first to join! Thanks very much for your interest. We appreciate it.

Michelle D. Godfrey
Public Information Officer for
Oregon’s Road Usage Charge Program
Oregon Department of Transportation

Thursday, August 20, 2015

Traveling the OReGO Trail - Big Trip

We packed up the pop-up camper and the SUV and we hit the road for a long weekend at the lake in the hot, high desert of central Oregon. This was our first long trip since we joined the OReGO program and I was curious to see how our trip would be logged.

Pulling the camper, packed with gear, and headed over the Cascades, the gas mileage was expected to be lower than usual. I wondered if the unit plugged into the ODBII port would correctly measure this change in fuel use.

150 Mile trip tracked by OReGO
The jumpy GPS issue that I discussed previously, was in effect again. This time it even had me doing a loop around all of downtown Portland:
Inaccurate tracking results in silly routes that were not taken
Here is the data that OReGO logged for the trip there:
169.1 miles
11.23 gallons
$2.54 mileage fee
$3.37 fuel tax refund

So with the refund and fees, I was refunded 83¢ for this drive.

The MPG is not explicitly listed on the OReGO but they have miles and gallons, so it is not hard to compute. On this trip we averaged 15 MPG. This is lower than the 17 or 18 MPG that the SUV usually gets. So the unit seems to have correctly comprehended the change in MPG from pulling the camper.