Should electric car incentives be more creative?

Irish Times

5 hours ago

Q: Should governments/cities offer citizens shared mobility vouchers or a car scrappage scheme as an alternative to grants and incentives for the encouragement of EV private car ownership, to make better use of vehicles and speed up the electrification of our transport? And are autonomous robo taxis the next evolution of public transport?
–
Cormack McK, Co Dublin
A:
The first question here is particularly pertinent, as there does seem to be a groundswell towards a new scrappage scheme to encourage Irish
car
buyers to opt for an
electric car
next time out.
It's certainly worked in the past. Back in 2000, a scrappage scheme that encouraged owners of older, less-safe vehicles to trade-in for a new set of wheels arguably overperformed, and saw the Irish market for new cars jump to a record of 247,000 sales. Ever since then, the Irish car trade has been moaning that it doesn't sell enough cars.
There was another scrappage boost in 2009, aimed to lure motorists towards cars with
lower CO2 emissions
(ironically, largely diesel-engine cars) while also helping the motor trade weather the dire economic headwinds of the time.
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Both certainly put more cars on the road than would have otherwise been the case.
However, there are inevitably trap doors when it comes to scrappage schemes. Many consider a scrappage scheme to be an inequitable way to distribute finite State funds. The claim is that such incentives are merely subsidising car purchases for the well-off in society.
Equally, there's a solid argument that finite funds should be prioritising
public transport
over private, especially if we really want to make a dent in CO2 emissions. Electric cars certainly have their place in that reduction, but they're not the be-all and end-all for lowering carbon emissions.
It's also often dismayingly easy to game a scrappage scheme unless very strict terms and conditions are applied and we've been burned by scrappage in the past. In 2009, the scrappage scheme was meant to encourage people to buy cars with lower CO2 emissions, which it duly did.
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However, as noted above, almost all of those cars came with diesel engines. First off, diesel power did most certainly not suit everyone's driving style, as legions of clogged-up diesel particulate filters came to prove.
Secondly, Dieselgate was just around the corner. While it certainly seems that encouraging everyone to shift to electric motoring is the right thing to do, it's worth remembering that many of us thought diesel was the right thing to do in 2009. We don't have the luxury of a second go at this.
It certainly seems as if a potential scrappage scheme would encourage more interest in electric cars.
Second-hand classified site Carzone has seen EV searches up 16 per cent year-on-year.
'Models such as the
Volkswagen ID4
,
Tesla Model 3
,
BYD Atto 3
and
Hyundai Ioniq 5
remain among the most searched, reflecting the growing appetite among Irish motorists,' according to Carzone.
'However, barriers such as cost, charging infrastructure and range remain significant considerations. A well-structured scheme that addresses these challenges would play an important role in making EV ownership more accessible.'
And therein lies a significant problem. The Government already offers as much as €8,500 off the price of a new electric car in grants and incentives, as well as other ongoing savings.
Yet EV sales, although growing, are nowhere near where we thought they'd be.
EVs are also becoming cheaper, due to the tumbling cost of batteries, so would a scrappage scheme that offered maybe €1,000 or €1,500 off the price of a new electric car make that big a difference? Possibly not, and even if it did, the argument that such a scheme is just aiding car purchases for the well-off would still echo.
Surely the issue of getting more EVs on the road would be better tackled by more effort in improving the charging network.
More fast chargers are being added, driven by EU legislation, but we're well behind others when it comes to setting up slower chargers in car parks and on kerbsides, and the cost of public charging is fast becoming a barrier to uptake.
Running an EV is cheap if you're doing most of your charging at home, but it's far from affordable if you're reliant on the public charging network.
The idea of shared mobility vouchers is an interesting one, and Ireland is – again – well behind the curve when it comes to the affordability of public transport (not to mention its availability).
A recent trip to Prague, for example, showed that a monthly ticket for public transport covering buses, trams, metro and local trains costs the equivalent of €22, and there's a discount for students and minors, which means it costs them just €5.20.
Even at the best Taxsaver rate, a monthly ticket for Dublin commuters costs €45, and that's just for Zone One. Clearly, providing better and more affordable public transport would be a massive boost to carbon reduction figures, not to mention potentially a tool for regenerating city centres.
As for autonomous 'robo atxis' – don't hold your breath.
Such technology certainly exists, but its price has not meaningfully come down since companies such as Google's Waymo, or Uber, started large-scale robotic taxi testing in the US.
The tech needed to create a robotic driving system that's genuinely as skilled and aware of its surroundings as even a half-decent human is mind-bogglingly expensive.
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General Motors, the US' biggest car maker, pulled the plug on its Cruise robot taxi service late last year, and
Renault
has recently said that it sees autonomous tech as more useful for large-scale public transport systems – buses and trains – than for individual cars. Equally, adding more cars to our streets isn't going to resolve the congestion problems in our city centres.
What does that leave us with? Well, we know that incentives are certainly a useful way of encouraging people to buy an electric car.
Indeed, without incentives many of the EVs on the market right now would be €8,500 more expensive, and that would definitely hurt their sales.
The experience of the German government, which ended incentives almost overnight and saw a subsequent plummet in new EV sales, would seem to show that incentives work.
Are they a perfect solution? No, not in the slightest, but perhaps perfection is not what we should be looking for here. Any encouragement is useful, and any one person who makes the switch from combustion to electric motoring is another step on the long road to carbon neutrality.
In the background, though, we need to be working on the bigger picture: on a charging network that functions properly and reliably for all users; expanding renewable energy for the grid; developing viable e-fuels and biofuels to power the existing car park of combustion engine cars; at least considering the potential for hydrogen as a power source; and creating an electricity supply set-up that's affordable at the point of use when charging.
Those are the actions which will truly transform both electric car ownership and emissions from transport. Incentives are really just an early-days sticking plaster.