Doesn’t this negate a lot of the benefits of de-ICEing vehicles?
Why doesn’t the government use gas tax increases as a tool instead of up-front discounts?
Getting the 100km/day driver to change from ICE to electric would have 10x the impact as the 10km/day driver.
Given the huge corpus of two datapoints (Norway and France), it seems that:
- if you offer discounts on EVs, people who own gas-powered cars will progressively replace them with EVs ;
- if you increases gas taxes, people who own gas-powered cars will spend their saturday afternoons demanding your head on a spike, and stop voting for you until you roll-back on the gas tax increases. (At which point, they will mostly keep not voting for you, but that's an unrelated debate.)
I suspect not every government has the benefit of choosing between both options - Norway might be an outlier here.
(And most government will probably choose the "wise" third path of doing nothing.)
My underlying theory (that must have been tested by Cialdinni, Khaneman or Ophra) is that rebates feel good, and taxes feel bad. But I don't have a double-blind placebo-controlled experiment to cite.
According to https://www.globalpetrolprices.com/gasoline_prices/
(Or $7.5 per US Gallon in Norway)
This is exactly why gas taxes are bad.
> is that rebates feel good, and taxes feel bad
You can also like some California air quality districts are doing buy back low income peoples junkers and provide them down payment assistance for hybrid and electric cars. There is a lot less political blow back from those sorts of programs.
Point-of-purchase taxes affect the choice of which vehicle to buy at the point where you were already deciding which vehicle to buy.
No, I think fuel taxes are the right way to do this - the more fuel you use the more you drive = the more you pollute.
Driving a vehicle on 10-20k is shocking from an environmental perspective once you include manufacturing.
I keep harping on that. Consider a 10 year old Toyota Camry. Soon as it was built we were committed to another 60 tons of CO2 emissions. Raising the gas tax doesn't undo that decision. And people don't junk cars because the price of gas. They junk cars because of maintenance and repair costs.
Raising gas taxes is totally weak sauce and invites political blow back. Better to just pay people to take marginal cars off the road. And discourage people from buying new ICE powered cars. Especially low MPG ICE cars.
-Not if there are 20 times as many 10km/day drivers as 100km/day ones.
Put another way - if the bulk of commutes are fairly short, the advantages of having these becoming electric is larger than that of electrifying the comparatively few long commutes - doubly so as an ICE is a much worse polluter when cold than at proper running temperature.
The first few km are the most polluting especially for NOx. Part of the push for electric is about NOx emissions rather than CO2.
Sure some of the benefits, but the context is in the discussion of incentives and the attractiveness for the average buyer. 10km/day drivers have their needs sufficiently met with cheaper, shorter-range EVs.
Most of those live in more remote areas of the country, which have lower population density and as such get charging station coverage later.