It is very common to impose rationing instead of taxation.
CAFE standards don't tax cars by fuel consumption; they ration fuel consumption. California electric bills are a mix, complicated by the quasi-governmental status of PG&E, but you can get a small ration of electricity at a high price, but anything beyond your ration comes at an extremely high price. During the late 70s energy crisis, US rationing measures limited how much fuel you could put in your car or truck not per week but per gas-station visit, resulting in truckers having to fill up their tanks only halfway at each fuel stop. California's new measure, when it goes into effect, will not tax gasoline generators; it will just prohibit selling new ones, and it's built on a regulatory framework that rations pollution rather than taxing it. Fuel rationing is also historically extremely common in wartime.
As Wes points out, one political reason for this is that rationing is felt to be less unjust than Pigovian taxation because the burden falls equally on everyone rather than disproportionately on the poor. Often this is only true in theory, as the trucker example demonstrates.
There is every reason to expect that making rationing rather than taxation easier will further increase its use as a tool of social policy.
It's a miles-per-gallon efficiency standard. And non-compliance is punished with fees -- fees that're apparently so small that some luxury-brands seem to prefer to just pay them than comply.
Leaving drivers stranded at a gas-pump, unallowed to use their own cash to buy gas, would be an entirely different thing.
My comment was unclear; I didn't mean to say it was fuel rationing. I meant to say it was fuel-inefficiency rationing. (Unfortunately, "fuel consumption" is more easily interpreted in the way I didn't intend; I meant "fuel consumption per kilometer", a concept for which I will use "lpkm" below.) Each car is allowed to consume up to a certain lpkm, averaged over the manufacturer's offerings. It's true that a strict rationing scheme would simply stop sales rather than merely levying a fine, and that being stranded on the way to work is a worse outcome than either one.
There are two key aspects of the CAFE that are more ration-like than Pigovian-tax-like:
1. The fine is zero for manufacturers whose "fleets" are more efficient than the standard requires, so it provides no incentive to reduce lpkm below the quota.
2. The quota is averaged across all the manufacturer's vehicles, so it is in a sense a per-vehicle lpkm quota that the manufacturer can choose to redirect from some vehicles to others, so a luxury car maker can evade the "tax" by merging with an economy subcompact car maker.
There's a third aspect, though, that cuts in the opposite direction. CAFE is calculated on reciprocal lpkm, so I think adding excess lpkm to an already-inefficient "fleet" costs less than adding the same excess lpkm to one that's just violating the quota. So a car maker that greatly exceeds the quota can reduce the "tax" by splitting a division that roughly meets the quota out into a separate company.
For example, gas-stations already ration gas: they won't sell you more than so much at a time (because the pumps only go so fast). And gas-stations ration how many vehicles they'll fill (because they only have so many pumps). And they won't sell more than so much gas at a time in the event of a rush (because the gas-station only has so much available between refuels). And your car rations how much gas you're able buy at once (because the tank is only so large).
But.. I feel like that's just a framing we can push onto about anything; we're basically just looking for things to apply the word "ration" to.
Communication can be difficult. I'm sorry I wasn't able to communicate with you. I agree with your evident opinion that the things you enumerate are not rationing.
CAFE standards don't tax cars by fuel consumption; they ration fuel consumption. California electric bills are a mix, complicated by the quasi-governmental status of PG&E, but you can get a small ration of electricity at a high price, but anything beyond your ration comes at an extremely high price. During the late 70s energy crisis, US rationing measures limited how much fuel you could put in your car or truck not per week but per gas-station visit, resulting in truckers having to fill up their tanks only halfway at each fuel stop. California's new measure, when it goes into effect, will not tax gasoline generators; it will just prohibit selling new ones, and it's built on a regulatory framework that rations pollution rather than taxing it. Fuel rationing is also historically extremely common in wartime.
As Wes points out, one political reason for this is that rationing is felt to be less unjust than Pigovian taxation because the burden falls equally on everyone rather than disproportionately on the poor. Often this is only true in theory, as the trucker example demonstrates.
There is every reason to expect that making rationing rather than taxation easier will further increase its use as a tool of social policy.