They have 2 more shots at Reconciliation this fiscal year (9/30/21), per the Parliamentarian.
If driving ev adoption is the goal, I’d rather see:
$5k purchase credit, 1 per person/lifetime, income capped — spread more money around, don’t concentrate it
Manufacturer capped at 10% of total sales their best year, or 500k units for new companies
MSRP capped at 50k
Tax credits for installing home charging, and most importantly:
Give gas stations credits to install 1-2 DCFC stations. The big thing gov’t could possibly help with here is range anxiety, not subsidizing $100k Lucids and Teslas for the wealthy.
Those are completely arbitrary numbers that will be gamed especially in the new age of OTA updates and feature enablement. Here is a $49,999 MSRP base car. Once you buy it, you can enable extended range for $10,000, advanced driving assist for $10,000, phone charging for $1000, each USB port for $50, sunroof switch will start working for another $5000, anyway, your total is $84,349 MSRP, enjoy your subsidized ride. Or we’ll lease you all the extra features for $500 a month.
Stop funding cars directly, fund infrastructure, and make sure it’s a UNIVERSAL infrastructure. We don’t need a bunch of disjointed chargers that may or may not work for some cars. Make sure that the new infrastructure is exactly like gas stations, where gas is gas regardless of what you drive. And while on the surface it may sound anti-Tesla it’s really pro-standards.
This is exactly right. In Europe the EU mandates every charging station have type 2 cords and every car accept type 2 chargers. So every electric car is theoretically capable of charging at any charger (Tesla still has their own network). Unsurprisingly Tesla chose to comply with this directive and modify their European cars instead of leaving the EU market.
I also used MSRP for simplicity but agree that would not work since you could game the system. List a MSRP of 49k but sell for 60k. You probably do it by saying only for cars with taxable cost of under X dollars. You can fudge a lot of things but lying about how much a customer paid for a car for tax purposes seems like it wouldn’t be worth the risk. Right now some states may not tax for over the air updates yet but if that sort of game became prevalent the laws would change quickly because states aren’t going to allow dealerships to sell a 70k car for 20k taxable and then have a customer pay 50k to turn on the power windows, radio, HVAC…i.e. make the car a usable vehicle.
No guarantees NJ state rebates will still be in place by the time the fed rebate kicks in, if it does. Tax exemption is more likely to stick than the 5k.
We are talking about the same thing. The Federal credit is for the owner of the car (the captive), not the person leasing it. The captive may choose to pass-on $0-entire credit as an incentive to the person leasing it.
