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Comment by manxman | Hacker News Reader

Fishy click bait title. The reason electric is so popular is that ICE vehicles get taxed 100% and electrics are not. Remove the incentives and I suspect the market would be different.

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It's a case study on what could happen if EV's become cheaper than gasoline vehicles. It doesn't really matter if the shift happens due to subsidies or market forces.

Basically this study has figured out that if you subsidize Ferraris, people are going to ride in Ferraris. But the moment you will stop subsidizing them people will return back to normal cars.

Absolute majority of countries does not have a capital of Norway to subsidize on such a large scale.

Take a look at what's happening in the Chinese car market. Electric cars are getting cheaper, and EVs are selling despite subsidies expiring or being lowered.

That's subsidized electricity in China. If you would be selling liter of gas for 10cents, people would be driving car even between single blocks.

No they wouldn't. Ferraris are impractical, expensive to fuel, unreliable, can't be used on poor roads, hard to get into, have no luggage space, only hold two people, et cetera. Their main appeal is that they signal status. And if they were cheap, they don't do that.

EVs had similar drawbacks: range anxiety, et cetera. It was not a given that people would buy them even if they were cheaper.

Now we know they will, and get a glimpse of society in a world where EV's are cheaper than gasoline cars.

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