A $20k American-made electric pickup with no paint, no stereo, no screen

For anyone curious, if you made a similarly sized gas-powered pickup with an i4 engine, it would be penalized more than a full-sized pickup for being too fuel inefficient, despite likely getting much better mileage than an F-150 because, since 2011, bigger cars are held to a lesser standard by CAFE[1].

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_average_fuel_economy...

Example #5621 that a simple carbon tax would be miles better than the complex morass of regulations we currently have.

I think the best way is to tax fuel itself. This way worse mpg result in more tax.

Tax diesel more than gasoline, LNG less.

That makes sense, but there would be no incentive to switch to an engine that emits less carbon for the same fuel consumption (if such a thing exists)

You don't create carbon out of thin air, it's from the fuel, so burning the same quantity of fuel will result in the same quantity of carbon, no matter how the engine works. Therefore a tax on fuel is a tax on carbon.