Comment by robocat
2 days ago
The same thing happened with electric car purchase incentives in New Zealand. The poor cannot afford to buy a new car - so only the well off received the efficient car discount incentives.
The trickle down as those cars depreciated in value was years away.
That doesn’t really sound like the worst thing?
Someone has to buy them for full price before they show up on the used market 5-10 years later.
That doesn't make sense because the second hand car is not cheaper by the amount of the subsidy. Say subsidy is $20k, second-hand car might eventually be $6k cheaper (and the discount time value of money means that the $6k is actually less than $4k). Giving the wealthy person $20k, and the poor person less than $4k is strange.
New Zealand used car market is likely very different from the market where you are. The cheapest Model 3 I could find was a USD18000 for a 2020.
Subsidies make sense if the environmental gains outweigh the costs of the subsidies.
Subsidies: there was a purchase subsidy, charging stations were subsidised, and I think electric cars are not paying their fair share of road maintenance (much of our road costs are paid for by an excise tax on usage via petrol-tax or heavy-vehicle-milage).
That math doesn’t add up. If I buy a $100,000 car for $80,000, and I sell it to someone for $60,000, the recipient still gets a $40,000 discount.
And if you pretend that there is no subsidy, and the original owner paid $80,000 just because it cost that much unsubsidized, the second buyer still gets the same discount off the original purchase price.
So the fact that the car was originally subsidized isn’t relevant.
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