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Comment by modeless | Hacker News Reader

The tax credit is guaranteed as long as you made less than 300k this year or last year (150k if not married), and it is now given directly at time of purchase instead of later when you file. Seems OK to include. The gas savings is much more speculative.

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Do people making less than 150k buy 100k cars? I don't have a good sense for how Americans budget their vehicle purchases.

I'm pretty sure a lot of people making less than 150k buy $60k F-150s.

There’s a big difference between $60k and 100k.

My point is Cybertruck starts at $60, not $100k, and likely a majority of sales will happen closer to $60k than $100k. But I'd venture to guess that a majority of people buying even the $100k variant do qualify for the credit.

absolutely, and people making less than 50k buy 50k cars. Plus, there are also a lot of people in low cost of living areas that hapily drop cash on cars.

I was visiting my hometown where houses are 200k and lots of households make 100k-200k/yr. All the driveways were full of new trucks, SUVs, and boats.

Should they? Probably not in most cases. Do they? Absolutely.

The real killer here though is the limit. If you're making $160k, that $7000 is still a real incentive. Can you afford it without, sure, but if we're trying to incentivize EVs then everyone should get the incentive... sometimes wealthy people are wealthy because they save money whenever possible, so the incentive will still move the needle on EV adoption.

Like all incentives, it should be on a sliding scale. Frankly, fall benefit would start to fall off after 100k income and/or some vehicle value cutoff, maybe 50k. Beyond either value, you'd then decay to upper limits linearly (easier for the consumer to understand) with upper income level 160-180k range ish, and upper vehicle value maybe 100k.

All numbers subject to change!

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