Hacker News Reader

Comment by Arbalest | Hacker News Reader

When you have the population density and city pollution levels they have in big Indian cities, I don't blame them for trying to discourage the use of petrol. Even if you don't believe in climate change, there's real haze over many of their cities which has well documented effects on respiratory health.

View on HN

It has nothing to do with climate change though. Fuel is very price inelastic , i.e. higger price doesn't reduce consumption that much. higher fuel prices adversely affect the poor a lot more .

This tax is largely because despite all the buzz on growth and economic policy ( demonitization etc) the current government is completely incompetent (last wasn't that much better either) to actually increase tax collection.

Very few indians pay tax - only salaried employees really , that's a small percentage of the population.

Also taxing fuel that high is going to also force people to use less clean fuel like wood etc that will negatively impact pollution

Yes higher prices reduce consumption. There is no perfectly inelastic market. There are cheap Chinese electric vehicles available

Are they cheap and sturdy enough as to allow a very poor person to sell their petrol car and buy one of those?

A “very poor person” in an Indian context doesn’t own a car.

A lot of people in India use scooters and motorcycles.

The transition to electric scooters is happening. There are a few local companies in the space. They tend to be a lot easier to manufacture than electric cars.

The number of electric scooters is super negligible.

Ola's electric scooter got a lot of bookings, hope it's good enough to replace a petrol scooter Ather, Hero and TVS already have electric scooters, but they are not much known in the market rn.

I'm an avid fan of EVs, but a lot of issues are still there.

For eg, Ola hasn't made a single delivery yet. Also it is too costly for poor people. Forget delivery, they haven't even kept a single vehicle for test drive

Poor people in India struggle with eating twice a day, the ones who have to choose between grocery and medicine don't have 100k to give Ola for an electric 2 wheeler.

The price of petrol 2 wheelers is also shooting up.

Activa cost 40k INR jjst 7yrs ago. Today it's touching 100k INR.

Also range is a big issue as is the availability of chargers and electricity in general.

I read an interview in a newspaper where a daily wage labourer / small office worker said that he earned 500INR daily and has to travel 10km on his petrol bike and it's getting difficult to have any savings. I think.his exact words were "Can't explain to my kid why I didn't bring him any food item or a toy. I just don't have enough money as majority goes in petrol"

Also ruling party ministers have made bizzare claims like "only 5% ppl use petrol"

op has put it correctly. Here people can't eat due to increasing prices (transportation of goods) and people are talking about climate change. fml

Ola has no prior auto manufacturing experience, they are already delayed [1], their ability to deliver sales, or after sales support and do local manufacturing is as yet unproven.

Tesla came very close to collapse when they couldn't scale few times. Ola's success and the market appetite for e-bikes remains to be seen.

India's shift to electric is driven by fuel cost conscious buying rather than by climate consciousness, that means Ola (and others) do not have the support that Tesla enjoyed when their product was(still is?) not on par with ICE car from ideological buyers .

These scooters also will not be able to command a large premium to current prices and also do the volume to make in-roads in the market. There is a reason that electric is less than 1% of the market.

My uninformed estimate is that market can realistically only pick up significantly when battery chemistry evolves enough to make a decent range (> 150+ Miles) scooter priced at < $1,500 US . I have not read anything on how Ola or others are actually making batteries cheaper or better range like with say Tesla's 4680.

[1] Not unexpected or surprising for a very new player

Oil prices are not about cars only imo. Everything increases in price because everything is transported via oil :(

The price elasticity of fuels is famously low. So, increasing the price of fuel by 10% will not lead to a 10% reduction in consumption.

The government knew this and doesn't claim that these are meant to reduce fuel consumption. Besides, it's not like much of India has decent public transport.

The high taxes are not meant to reduce consumption but shore up revenue. The Indian government slashed corporate tax rates last year. And revenues from GST were lower than expected because of the shutdowns imposed to contain the pandemic.

Here are two very well written articles by Vivek Kaul which explain the high prices in great detail:

https://vivekkaul.com/2021/06/17/petrol-and-diesel-prices-ar...

https://vivekkaul.com/2021/07/14/whats-the-real-story-behind...

Public transport costs are increasing as well.

I used to pay 10rs for a shared auto per 5km, now it's gone to 15/20.

Public transport aka buses are still cheap but number of busses and their frequency is low

Increase in fuel prices increases the cost of all transport. This causes inflation all across the board

Off topic, but are you the guy whose Reddit username is also unmole?

To be able to be discouraged from doing something, one needs to be able to do that in the first place.

This is like the French queen saying, "if they cannot afford bread, why don't they eat cake?"

Yeah, poor people shouldn’t have transportation.

t.hackernews

Yes, its funny people think its about tackling climate change and encouraging people to use petrol/diesel alternatives. When in reality there is none present and people still have to commute everyday to work in petrol/diesel vehicles.

Before asking middle class people to use public transport instead of motorcycle, you have to actually provide good public transport.

Now... my granddad was a miner after the second world war, and he commuted roughly 20 km (one way) every day by bicycle and even rode from the Ruhr region in Germany to Austria on it(no fancy mountainbike or roadbike, just an old "Vaterland")...

Great anecdote. How do you travel to places? I’m guessing the answer is either a fossil-fuel vehicle, or an expensive electric vehicle.

Mostly by (expensive) bike or - if i have stuff or more bodies than my own to transport - with a shared family car.

I really really wanted to buy a 2 wheeler EV 3yrs ago. But the only available option was Okinawa bike that went barely 50km in one charge. I now have a 3yr old petrol 2 wheeler that I need to get rid of until I have some sensible options in EVs. Ola, simple energy won't make a delivery in a fewmonths and they're over booked as hell. And current vehicles have too short range (less than 80km actual)

Currently the only affordable 4wheeler ev in India is Nexon EV at 150k INR. MG has an ev at 250k INR and Hundai too at 250K INR

Prices need to come down. Charging stations need to be set up + batteries should last for a long time

The numbers are wrong. 150k is 1.5 Lakhs. Nexon is 15 Lakhs. So it should be 1.5 million INR.

Thank you.

Yeah but when petrol taxes are high, people buy more efficient cars. Super obvious if you look at a street in France versus in the United States, where so many poor people have 20mpg cars.

Indian poor people have to choose between food and Medicine.

I assure you they don't own cars with low mileage.

We've gone down in rankings for Hunger for Christ's sake. There is actual penury here.

Even German poor people can’t afford a nice efficient car. All they can get is a 2000 euros beater from the early 2000s.

This electric vehicle/expensive fuel trend will fuck poor people in every country.

Uh that's a creative way of looking at it. When you increase fuel prices:

1. Daily expense increases for commuters

2. An already weak public transport becomes expensive for commuters

3. Cost of almost everything increases (our logistics are road heavy)

4. Income of individuals are not increasing, so above 3 are going to hurt a lot more

Reply on news.ycombinator.com