Most of the other comments seem quite negative. It is protectionism, but it applies to most electric cars and is a step in the right direction. It is late and selfish, but better than the alternative.
What's funny is how the requirement of a <= 60k EUR car price means that those buying a Tesla won't get any subsidies. It's kind of understandable though: in Germany most cars are sold in the 10-20k EUR range, so it would be political suicide to create a subsidy to pay for what most citizens consider a luxury. Subsidizing cars in the 40k-60k EUR is quite outrageous already IMO.
I don't understand it personally, I prefer cycling and having my mortgage paid off but everyone to their own :)
I guess if you're in your 50s then you paid very little for your house so it makes sense to pay the 1200 EUR a month net for a car.
The government has acknowledged this now, and it will tapered down / abolished. Not sure.
For electric cars you pay 4% of the new price for the first 50k then 21% over the rest. Your employer pays the lease itself (about 1.2k EUR for a Model 3 last I checked).
Although this is marketed as a "tax cut to the rich" that isn't completely true. Most new car sales here come from leases. In 4 years time these cars will hit the second hand market and be bought by people like me.
We should absolutely be increasing tax on the most environmentally unfriendly leases and using that money to fund the lower rate on pure electric cars. Let the SUV drivers pay.
Which is great you like Me or my parents who have a spare 8-10k - if your a single mom living in rented accommodation who buys her electricity via a key not so much.
What does "via a key" mean?
This is, of course, tailored at the poor.
https://cleantechnica.com/2019/04/13/tesla-model-3-vs-bmw-3-...
It's not out of the question that Tesla drops the price to 39.999E without the fancy AP hardware so people take full advantage of the subsidy.
> For electric cars over €40,000, there will be an increase in the subsidy by 25%. Any car priced over €60,000 will not supported by the scheme.
For 20k EUR I get a decent Mercedes C 220: https://www.autoscout24.de/angebote/mercedes-benz-c-220-c-kl...
or a decent E350 with 40k km (similar to the one I bought, see below): https://www.autoscout24.de/angebote/mercedes-benz-e-350-t-cd...
etc. The only people buying new cars in Germany are either private companies / leasing companies, or rich people that don't know what to do with their money.
You can get pretty much any 2 year old car with 20-40k km for 1/2 of the original price in perfect condition, and 1/4 of the original price with 100k km and being 3 year old model which is more or less what many leasing car get in the 2-3 years its leased.
I was looking for a car in the ~<80k EUR segment early this year and ended up paying 26k for an E350 from 2016 with 60k km and 3 years warranty, and buying a super sport bike also used for 9k as well instead, and saved over 50k EUR in the process that I ended up putting in ETFs.
Buying new cars makes zero economic sense. Even if you try to buy from the German manufacturers here, their websites offer you used cars ("refubrished") with 5 years warranty for a fraction of the price.
If you are looking for a car in the 40k EUR segment, for buying new to be worth it would mean that 20k EUR are "nothing" for you, which is hard to believe because if that were the case you'd be actually looking at cars in at least the 80-120k range. Even for somebody making 120k EUR/year, 20k EUR is still not pocket change, its two months salary full-time.
I'm not sure why they are so expensive, but I can imagine that if you have to retrofit the battery system for 20-30k EUR before reselling them, then that's going to drive their price up quite a bit.
Not involved with any of this! Poland stronk. We love Poland in any case.
How does that work?
Assuming a base state of
* Car costs $34000, subsidy is $4000, manufacturer pays $2000
How are the two following scenarios different:
* Car costs $34000, subsidy is $5000, manufacturer pays $2000
* Car costs $35000, subsidy is $6000, manufacturer pays $3000
It seems like the "manufacturer pays half" thing is just a trick to make the subsidy appear more palatable to voters/taxpayers, since effectively, the manufacturer is paying itself.
Electric cars only make 1% of the annual car registrations in Germany and 0.18% of the total number of cars registered.
In fact, Volkswagen is planning a new factory for cars with combustion engines in Turkey. It's just currently put on hold due to the conflict at the Syrian border.
But just from the fact that electric cars have a 5 times higher share of new registrations than of existing cars shows that it's a growing market, and adoption curves usually grow exponentially until you approach market saturation. Volkswagen is doing a lot to get a bigger piece of that pie.
Yes, there is a long tail of applications where EVs are not a reasonable proposition. Emergency services (police, medical, fire fighting) come to mind immediately. There is pretty much no way you can built an all-electric fire truck with batteries that isn't much worse than ICE fire trucks today: Battery weight means you can carry less water, which directly reduces operational capability; limited battery charge means the truck's pumps don't last as long, and a battery is much harder to refuel in the field than a tank of diesel. Similar reasons apply to ambulances. Some L.E. vehicles can reasonably be made to work as EVs (patrol cars), others not so much. Whenever you need to maximize off-grid operational time or you continuously need a lot of power, EVs are just not a sane option.
Additionally the small number of these vehicles make their emissions rather irrelevant.
You can use fuel cells. Harder than a tank of diesel (less energy dense), but not by much.
Of course in sparsely populated places like much of the US this looks completely different. Another class of vehicle that will hold onto ICE for a long while will be farming vehicles. I don't see a farmer recharging his combine harvester in the middle of the field until we have made significant advances in battery tech.
The problem is not so much the driving range, that is true. The problem is that taking out a fire might take 10 minutes, 10 hours or 10 days. The electric truck is fine for 10 minutes, but it won't be fine when you have to stay on site for a couple hours.
[0] https://electrek.co/2019/11/04/vw-id3-production-electric-ca...
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-volkswagen-strategy/vw-em...
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-volkswagen-emissions-comb...
https://www.freiepresse.de/nachrichten/sachsen/volkswagen-be...