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Comment by olex | Hacker News Reader

One thing the article is missing: the subsidy is explicitly limited to vehicles that cost less that 60.000€. One can say with pretty high confidence that this is done with the explicit goal of excluding Tesla's Model S and Model X.

This would be somewhat understandable, given that the subsidy's purpose is to give an upper hand to our own automotive industry in the electric market... if they had anything to offer. The updated BMW i3 is arguably the only German electric vehicle worth mentioning. E-Golf utterly fails on range (pending a future update), and both Daimler offerings (electric Smart and the B-Class Electric Drive) are way overpriced for what they offer.

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> One can say with pretty high confidence that this is done with the explicit goal of excluding Tesla's Model S and Model X.

One cannot.

Tesla loves to spin it that way, but forgets to mention that cars from other manufacturers, including Germany's BMW are also affected by that limit.

The simple, albeit boring, truth is that subsidizing the toys of the super-rich would be very unpopular.

If you have the money to buy a 80000 Euro car, you have the money to pay for it yourself.

I'm pretty sure you don't have to be super rich to own a model S or model X. I usually consider super rich to be owning a private jet kind of money. You can lease a model s for example for the monthly cost of a decent cloud server like an m4.10xlarge - sure it's expensive server, but we are not talking super rich expensive right?

Don't get focused on the "super" part. I think he's right, you must at least be "rich" to buy one of the current Tesla offerings. Rich in the sense that probabably less than 1/100 (most likely even much lower - maybe 1/1000) of the total population can afford a car in that price range. Especially if it's for private use and not a company car. I personally know 0 people that own a private 100k€ car.

It is a political isue. In Germany the average income is at about 30.000,- Euro.

So many people cannot aford any EV, even the cheapest. So they are excluded from any subsidies. But they pay their taxes. They work for the rich people, the company owners. They work for their profits, so that the rich are able to pay taxes or transfer the money to panama and avoid paying taxes.

The party SPD is a working class party for those people earning about 30.000,- and less.

And now consider to explain those people, that they pay taxes to subsidies the drives for the rich people. Driving Porsche 918 with Weisach-Update for example.

There is no way to do this without an upper limit.

"One thing the article is missing: the subsidy is explicitly limited to vehicles that cost less that 60.000€. One can say with pretty high confidence that this is done with the explicit goal of excluding Tesla's Model S and Model X."

Here in Flanders (Belgium) we also subsidy electric cars and while it doesn't exclude Tesla's, you will get a lot less than when you buy an electric car from another brand. And that mainly because they are cheaper.

I can say that with pretty high confidence it isn't about giving the upper hand to our none existing automobile industry, but prevent burning through the subsidy at a high rate.

Consumers who can afford >60.000€ cars are in most cases not the target group of these kind of subsidy programs.

> Consumers who can afford >60.000€ cars are in most cases not the target group of these kind of subsidy programs.

That's fine really. But the question in concern is that HOW the 60,000€ price point was achieved. It could well be 30,000€ or 40,000€ but the number seems arbitrary. One of the reasonable explanations, prima facie, that it is to exclude Tesla specifically.

See it from another angle: why are you so worked up over the specific limit of 60k? Because you would certainly say just the same thing, had the limit been 65k, 55k or even 30k.

You're practically demanding that the government chooses a limit to specifically include Tesla.

On the continuum of prices for electric vehicles Tesla is one of the (but not the sole) outlier. By choice. Of course chances are high that they will be excluded as long as there is any limit, no matter how that specific limit has been chosen.

Your argument would hold true for 65,000€ or 50,000€ limit too. Why not those limits then? How was the magic number of 65,000€ arrived?

I think you've missed the point again. I'm asking a question on how the 60,000€ number was arrived. If it is not arbitrary, it's fair game. If it isn't, it's a deliberate protectionist move.

Since you can ask that question for every number, it is useless.

Unless you have indications that suggest "a deliberate protectionist move" it's pure polemic.

I have no idea how that specific number was reached. But since I don't suggest ulterior motives or a grand conspiracy I don't have to provide anything. You have to show evidence or at least a coherent argument that amounts to more than "I don't like the outcome".

I've not suggested ANY conspiracy theory. I'm asking how that number was come to and it's a legitimate question.

"Hey Bill, we don't want to subsidize rich people's sports cars, what do you think is a good number for defining a sports car that we don't want to cover?

Uh, I don't know, maybe around 60k gets into the sports car range?"

You are right. 60k is an arbitrary number. Just like 50k and 70k is arbitrary.

But they wanted to have a limit, probably so rich people couldn't use it. So they probably just picked a round number that sounded nice.

I'm not sure if it's available in Germany, but in the UK Volvo do a varient of the V60 which is a plug in hybrid. Converting GBP to EUR it would be ~€65,000 vs €30,000 for the basic petrol model.

At this much more and with only a 30 mile range it's still only really for buyers in the "I've got cash to burn" category.

It's a kind of a straw man that you raise. I never said that it's not the "I've got cash to burn" category. All I'm asking is how that 60,000€ number was reached to. It could be 50,000€ or 70,000€ but it was specifically 60,000€

I don't know how it was achieved, but I would guess it was to choose a number that helps subsidize the majority of people without sounding unfair to anyone. If you go to 30k then you exclude most of the offerings, as the cost of EVs is currently still high.

Now 60k is a number that includes common middle cars (A4, C-Class, BMW3) or even the next line depending on the configuration. These are cars that are already expensive for the vast amount of the population, but still common enough that you should not reject the offer from those buyers. Especially since this is a price number where you still see an amount of private purchasers.

Everything above is mostly purchased by companies or by some very rich people. It does not make sense for the government to throw tax money at them.

>One thing the article is missing: the subsidy is explicitly limited to vehicles that cost less that 60.000€. One can say with pretty high confidence that this is done with the explicit goal of excluding Tesla's Model S and Model X.

In response the ever-cheeky Tesla is matching the subsidy, offering a lease on their base model for €494/mo.

http://electrek.co/2016/05/06/tesla-excluded-ev-incentives-g...

Do you think somebody who is going to spend 80.000€ on a car will be persuaded either way by a 4.000€ price difference?

Frankly, yes. If anything, someone who has spare 80k€ to spend on a car is more careful with his/her money, and 4k€ is nothing to sneeze at, no matter what kind of income one has.

This is ridiculous.

You should only buy a car if you can afford 2 of them.

You're right, the rich are tight-fisted.

But there are plenty of barely solvent people with delusions of affluence ...

No! Just look at how many people bought $80k teslas who previously only had <30k cars because they did not care about cars at all until a nice electric car came along. They want to save the environment and are willing to pay $$$ for it. According to a study I've read (can't find it sorry) 80k is a significant amount of most of those buyers but they are willing to lease a car for $800 a month to help the environment. So they are not millionaires who have more money then they can ever spend. Why should those people be punished?

Furthermore, most people who can afford those cars already pay more then 50% of their income in taxes so they should have every right to be rewarded for buying a "green Car".

Hopefully they won't end the subsidies in 2018, so at least Model 3 can benefit.

With the hybrids being included, I fear the money will run out before the first Model 3's arrive on this side of the Atlantic. I'd love if it didn't, being an early in-store reservation holder myself :)

> The updated BMW i3 is arguably the only German electric vehicle worth mentioning.

Pity it fell from the ugly tree, and hit all the branches on the way down. Unlike the i8 ...

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