lpm wrote: ↑Tue Jun 14, 2022 8:09 pm
It used to be £5,000.
Then £2,500 for cars under £35k.
Then under £32k.
The EU should subsidise cars at the £20k price, to try and get that part of the market going. Private enterprise is focus8ng on the luxury end.
I agree with the general sentiment of your series of posts, that subsidising the cars has been a subsidy to the better off, and that private enterprise has found most profit in the luxury end of the market.
Lower income people rarely buy new cars. They mainly buy second hand cars, if they buy them at all. So there is a sense in which subsidising new cars at any price is always a subsidy to the better off.
The replacement idea of subsidising public chargers is, in principle, if properly directed and managed, a much better idea. Many of the less well off live in the kind of property where you can't fit chargers, and public chargers tend to sell electricity at much more than the domestic rate of electricity. Even when you take into account depreciation of the charger, public chargers typically cost far more to construct than private home ones. So, since the public chargers are typically trying to recover that much higher depreciation, it costs a lot more than your own charger, even in the long run.
The best value for subsidy, and focusing on lower income beneficiaries, would seem to be paying for public chargers in residential areas where lower income people live. Even better, they should control the price of electricity from such chargers and requiring the electricity sold from them to be at a price similar to typical residential electricity, so that people who have to use them are not worse off.
But
OZEV's announcement of the policy change refers to subsidising public chargers to reduce range anxiety. That seems that they have more in mind en-route and at-destination public chargers, rather than near-home public chargers for those who don't have them. So that's focusing the benefit on the better off again, if taken at face value.