Also, giving tax breaks on luxury cars means shiftig wealth from the poor to the rich.
A single-digit sales tax or registration fee does not cover these costs to society caused by car owners. Therefore, these costs must be covered by the general fund: from income, payroll, and business taxes. These all apply equally whether or not you own a car, so if you don't buy a car, you're still paying for the environmental cost of having one but not getting the benefits.
Denmark has done a smart thing by placing high taxes on cars. Reasonable taxation policy helps make this decision more rational. The flat tax usually makes sense because cheap cars are likely to be low-powered sub-compacts, which have a smaller impact, while expensive luxury cars are more likely to be high-powered, heavy, large vehicles.
But EVs (and hybrids, to a lesser extent) break this model. They are expensive, but environmentally friendly. It makes sense to encourage their adoption through tax breaks. That is not a shift of wealth from the poor to the rich, it's an intelligent exception in a model intended to shift costs away from all of society to the source of those costs.
Not quite. EVs reduce direct pollution, but there are still a lot of negative externalities. There are obvious ones relating to the manufacture and also to then still requiring energy.
But car culture itself has all sorts of issues, no matter the drive train: it encourages bad urbanism and sprawl (with large environmental impact), encourages inefficient land use via extensive parking, it taxes the infrastructure, it encourages bad health, and also some direct accidents.
Trickle down environmentalism is just like regular trickle down economics.
(The steel/aluminum/plastics of a car's exterior/interior/chassis are shared by cars regardless of drive train and still the overall impact of those materials dwarfs the environmental impact of battery technologies.)
I wrote:
> EVs reduce direct pollution, but there are still a lot of negative externalities.
ETA: For what it's worth, I think the downvotes on this comment are fair too. It doesn't need to be reiterated that tired, off-topic comments are tired and off-topic every time somebody makes one. I answered because I feel bad when I see somebody confused, but this is another example of a comment that probably deserves to be downvoted even though it's correct.
Actually: The logic here is: “Tesla batteries use graphite; the world’s biggest source of graphite is in China; China has terrible pollution; therefore, Tesla is partially responsible for China’s pollution.” Except when I did some digging, I learned that Tesla uses synthetic graphite made mostly in Japan and Poland, and that the average Model S uses 100kg of it. That 100kg lasts for ten years, so the amount of graphite used to make a Model S is similar to the amount you’d use if you had a few barbecues a year.
But the big issue is still car culture and related energy waste, urban development and health issues.
True. but luckily most people don't commute by car here in Denmark, bike infrastructure is close to perfect. And most energy is renewable, so it's not as bad as it could have been.
That's a nice rationalizing lie we like to tell ourselves; they are not nice to live in, but we vastly prefer them to be that way and get very, very angry if something is not car-accessible.
Speaking more generally, I'd say few cities in Europe fit your description. Within the city limits I think people pretty much expect cars to be the least practical mode of transport. Very few shops have parking lots, and getting around is very slow. It's probably true in the US though.
Thankfully the one thing that this place gets right is the range and organisation of Public Transport.
A more effective policy at encouraging the growth of the EV sector would be a road pricing system where non-EV cars pay higher fees.
This sort of policy would have the added bonus of incentivizing people into public transit and active transportation, which is ultimately better for the environment than buying an EV car.
Not quite ...
If you taxed poor people to subsidize luxury cars (a regressive tax) then you would indeed shift wealth from the "poor" to the "rich".
However, if you tax rebate the "rich" to subsidize luxury cars you are instead shifting less wealth from rich to poor than you used to.
Maybe you should or should not do these things - I'm not going to debate that here - but I think that distinction is important and interesting ...
Giving away money worth 2 years of welfare to people who don't need money and just want to dump a car that still perfectly works sounds just crazy to me.
But as I understand, it's not really an import fee but a registration fee, which probably means you also have to pay it for domestically manufactured cars.
Indeed, it is payed even if you live in Denmark, go buy a car in Germany, drive it back to Denmark yourself, and want to use it there.