When you try and look for dog whistles everywhere the world becomes a useless cacophony of high pitched screeching. Road tax and vehicle tax are used pretty much interchangeably and I wouldn't read into the word choice any more than I'd read into the results of the coin toss.
You're being pedantic. Odds are your brain parsed the article from visual input not audio. It could go either way depending on which linguistic hard line you want to take.
commonly used by people who disingenuously use it's etymology to imply that all 'road users' (by which they mean cyclists) rather than 'vehicle users' should pay it
