EV sales plummet after clean car scheme scrapped (in New Zealand) | Hacker News Reader

EV sales plummet after clean car scheme scrapped (in New Zealand)

newsroom.co.nz

23 pointsTheAlchemist18 comments

The plummet as reported compares the final months of sales that benefited from the clean car discount against 1 month of sales after the discount was scrapped.

Hardly surprising there's a large difference - savvy buyers swooped in and purchased an EV before their price went up overnight.

As others have mentioned, changes to road user charges are another part of the new government's changes.

EVs now pay a road user charge whereas previously they did not. This was a secondary subsidy to further incentivise EV uptake and EV owners understood that it was always going to be a temporary exemption.

(The government plans to standardise road user charges across all vehicle types. Currently ICEs pay no direct road user charges and instead pay taxes on fuel.)

So there's a bit of double whammy here and it's hardly surprising that EV sales are experiencing a dip.

But once road user charges are standardised and more and cheaper EV options become available (as they are all the time) I expect EV sales to bounce back and continue to increase as a percentage of car sales.

A major missing piece of the picture here is the introduction of Road User Charges (RUC) for EVs. RUC are a tax levied on diesel vehicles in NZ. The idea being that the cost of maintaining roads is built into petrol taxes, but many (most?) diesel vehicles don't use the roads. Think farm tractors, construction equipment, etc. So the road tax is levied on diesel vehicles based on the distance they travel. You need to buy RUC credits to pay for your use of the roads.

Until recently EVs were exempt from RUC and so were extra cheap to operate. Now there is the double whammy of the removal of the subsidy and the extra cost of having to pay RUC.

You can argue that this is fair and expected, EV owners should pay for the roads they use, same as every one else. But the question remains as to whether the trade off of more ICEs vs EVs in the NZ vehicle fleet is worth it.

The Road User Charges level for Plugin-hybrids is also felt by somebody to be a too high. It has been pointed out that some efficient petrol cars might be cheaper to run.

Owners of older plugin-hybrids that only get a very short distance on battery are especially disadvantaged.

Good points indeed.

Regarding your last remark - yeah, it's a valid question. It also shows that without heavy subsides, in most countries, electric vehicles would sell a fraction of what they sold in the past 2 years.

That's too bad. At first sight NZ has great geography for mass scale EV adoption. Temperate climate and distances not exceeding 1000km. Why are they flopping this much? Are there no significant savings to be had by switching away from gas to electric propulsion in NZ? I'd love to hear some Kiwis comment on this situation.

I wouldn't be surprised if new National government has been heavily lobbied by Toyota to push hybrids instead of EVs. Introduction of Road user charges means EV or PHEV owners frequently pay more for road use than hybrid owners.

They already succumb to tobacco lobby pressures and might even offer tax breaks for tobacco's new products when plan was to be smokefree soon.

The new scheme is significantly worse for PHEVs. They have to pay road user charges (a per mile cost, usually limited to vehicles like EVs that don't pay gasoline tax) but they also have to pay the gasoline tax.

This is the new government reversing some of the things the previous government brought in.

I believe NZ EV buyers will be people buying to commute within a city or town. Most EV purchases are secondhand imports from Japan with limited mileage. While you do see EVs out in the wild, they will generally only be the new ones (Teslas, BYDS mainly) as there are not many places to charge outside of a city.

> Most EV purchases are secondhand imports from Japan with limited mileage

While Leaf is still super popular, most are actually new cars - mostly chinese and Tesla's.

> there are not many places to charge outside of a city

There are quite a bit to the point that owning old Leafs is feasible.

When I visited the South Island last year and rented a (gasoline) car I was struck by how little infrastructure there was even in the towns. And on the freeways there was almost nothing by the side of the road between towns every 30-50 miles.

Yep the South Island is bigger and less populated. The north island is very suitable for EV’s and there is a strong deployment of EV charger infrastructure.

All in all, north island driving distances are just pretty small. And the roads so windy you need a rest before you’d run out of juice.

Drastically different to Australia where you can drive at 110km/h in a dead straight line for hours on end.

My uninformed take as a Kiwi is that most cars here are second hand imports from Japan, so we need imported EVs from Japan to pick up.

Also, most people dont buy new cars, and the temperate climate means old cars live a long time, so our rate of replacement must be pretty low.

I think you are right here. Among people I know with EVs, they’re predominantly Japanese import Nissan Leafs.

With the clean car rebate, a Tesla Model 3 was comparable to a Toyota Camry, which saw a lot of these added to the fleet.

Any changes in the makeup of Japan’s fleet will eventually flow on to New Zealand.

I'm curious what fast charging standard is going to be standard for where Japanese used cars dominated market. Japan still stick with CHAdeMO for local market despite it's dying outside of Japan. I think it's quite bad for used car export economy.

Many new chargers here still sport chademo plugs

Hardly anyone has the money for a brand new car

Overall car sales in January were actually a bit up from January 2023 - and a bit down from January 2022.

The drop is very specific to EV cars.

> “The big barrier is a higher capital cost. If you think about New Zealand and a just transition, the reality is if the majority of Kiwis buy a car that’s worth around $7000, they’re not going to be buying electric for a very long time unless we can create that secondhand market.”

This is the kernel of the problem. Make an EV you can sell for $7K (and still has 250 km of range), and Bob's your uncle. Battery swapping seems to be one way to do this.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com