Italy to Scrap Road Tax From 2027, and Piedmont's Motorists Do the Arithmetic

Italy will scrap its annual road tax from 2027 for the owners of about 70 percent of the vehicles on its roads, according to The Local Italy, which reported the change on Thursday. The measure would end a payment that Italian motorists have long treated as an irritant rather than a policy instrument, and it would do so on a scale that leaves only a minority of vehicles still taxed.

The road tax — the bollo auto — is a regional levy, not a national one. Its proceeds are collected by the regions and are, in the ordinary course, earmarked for road maintenance and transport spending. The Local Italy's report sets out the scope of the change but does not say how the shortfall would be replaced, which is the question that will decide whether the measure is a genuine saving or a transfer of burden.

For Piedmont, the arithmetic is not abstract. The region's road network runs from the Turin conurbation into the Alpine valleys, where winter maintenance is expensive and the traffic is thin. A levy that exempts most vehicles while those costs remain is a structural gap, not a one-off.