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Also, I am not really arguing to change the overall car tax revenue. If there are 2 million cars in the state and the average car tax is say $500, I am saying let's just charge everyone $500 per car per year and be done with all the discussion of valuation metrics. And if we still want to hit people with expensive cars harder, we can drop the $500 to some lower amount and say that the sales tax on any car over X price should be Y percent more. We'd save a lot of administrative cost, and the system would be far more transparent. And it would still be a "property tax" -- there is no rule saying property tax has to be calculated on the value of the property, even though most property taxes are (when they are not, they are usually called "licenses," but they are still taxes based on what you own (like a dog, or a mooring, or the right to serve liquor, or the right to set lobster traps).