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Comment by glenndebacker | 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."

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.

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> 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 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.

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€

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