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Comment by FullyFunctional | Hacker News Reader

Dane here: essential bit of info is missing in the discussion. Cars are MUCH more expensive to buy and own (sales tax used to be 180%, but I’m expat). I knew very few < 24 yo who could afford a car. Personally I got my first at 32 … when I moved to USA. But cars here are dirt cheap to buy and own.

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Another Dane here.

> Cars are MUCH more expensive to buy and own (sales tax used to be 180%, but I’m expat).

The 180% tax rate is the highest bracket. So you don’t pay that rate on the first $x of the car’s price.

So really expensive cars are almost three times as expensive, but cheap cars are about as expensive as in all other countries. Which is why you see a lot of cheap/small cars in Denmark.

Does it make sense to buy bigger cars in Germany, then?

If you pay taxes in Denmark then, once you import the car into Denmark, you will pay the tax regardless of where you buy the car.

And if you keep German plates on it and drive it around you will get charged with tax fraud and a huge fine.

If living in Denmark and driving a car there, you need a Danish license plate for your car. If not, everyone and their mother would be driving around using Romania or Bulgaria registered cars...

OK, plates are a bit different, though. From the previous comment I thought the extra tax was a sales tax (which is in general not the same as registration fees). But I imagine governments always find ways to prevent competition that is not to their advantage (I.e. it seems that free flow of cars is actually restricted as per other reply to my previous comment)

Danes still own as many cars as everyone else, it's not really an outlier and the number of cars per capita is growing.

https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/databrowser/view/road_eqs_carh...

Their cars per capita is about 2/3 of the US [1]. I bet if you correct for the effect of GDP per capita, they will rank near the bottom among European countries too.

[1]: 0.540 for Denmark vs 0.868 for the US (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_vehicle...)

> I bet if you correct for the effect of GDP per capita, they will rank near the bottom among European countries too.

If you start correcting for other variables, you'll have to look at demographics, size and flatness of the country, prices, public transport availability, population distribution between rural and urban areas etc. etc.

Relatively poor Romania has a lower number of cars per capita and if you live in Bucharest like me, you'd believe everyone owns a car (half being Dacias), nobody rides a bicycle.

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