Isn't it relatively easy to bypass? The legal owner and the person that actually uses the car might be different people. E.g. a family might swap cars to lower their taxes.
That's why it's better to tax the energy itself directly. Instead of inventing a lot of complicated tax schemes and deductions and incentives, just increase the tax on gasoline/diesel. It steers people to fuel efficient cars, which steers the manufacturers to provide those cars.
The comment that started this thread though was about rich people being able to just pay the tax which is relatively smaller to them. Hence the idea to couple it to income.
