What advantages does this measure have over fuel taxes?
As far as I know, (higher) fuel taxes are more effective, much more fair, create better incentives and have more scientific evidence backing them up than this, but I may be missing something.
As far as I know, (higher) fuel taxes are more effective, much more fair, create better incentives and have more scientific evidence backing them up than this, but I may be missing something.
Advantage is through the coupled mechanism. There's a chicken and egg problem for consumers of EVs. People are less likely to buy EVs because there aren't many charging ports so they take on extra risk and cost while betting that the future will allow them to regain similar conditions to their ICE vehicle. Filling stations are also at a similar risk investment situation as they don't want to build charging stations when there aren't enough EVs on the road to justify their costs.
So consumers and filling stations are stuck in a Nash Equilibrium because neither wants to take on the market bet. Both will actually suffer losses for moving first and realistically will not receive rewards for investing early (i.e. there is little to no opportunity cost). So Germany is shifting the risk away from the consumer.
But this is just a guess and I'm sure there are naive aspects about it. But it is also naive to just assume that everything can be solved with taxes and incentives. Though I hope this policy has some aspect that creates opportunity costs for not installing charging stations (i.e. gov will subsidize stations installing them at a decreasing rate)
One issue the German state is trying to solve is that even charging stations that aren't economically profitable can be valuable to the overall system. Something along the lines of "you barely ever need that charger, but having it available solves range problems that would otherwise prevent you from getting an EV".
It's about the order of operations.
Ubiquitous fast charging infrastructure makes it much easier for people to make the switch to EVs, especially for people who don't have the ability to charge at their homes.
Lacking that, increasing gasoline taxes will just anger people who don't have access to a practical electric fueling option.