Something’s got to give – and will, soon.
Odds are it will be us. Giving more money, that is. Our punishment for not buying an electric car. Or put another way – to make it just as expensive for us to continue driving a non-electric car as it is to buy an electric car.
In order to “level the playing field.” Get ready – it’s coming.
It’ll be done in any of several ways. In China, people are allowed to drive non-electric cars, provided they pay an exorbitant fee – $14,000 – for the privilege. After winning a license plate lottery that allows them to pay the fee.
Winning the lottery can take years. But EVs can be registered immediately . . . and without the punitive fee.
In Western European countries, so-called “polluter pays” taxes are being applied to non-electric cars.
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Bans on the use of non-electric cars in certain areas have also been enacted, making people’s non-EVs . . . useless cars.
Such nudging is going to be necessary here, too – absent some sort of developmental miracle, because EVs as they are – as opposed to how we’re promised they will be – can’t compete on the economic merits.
It’s not a debatable point. It just is.
Put aside haggling over the electric car’s functional merits – or the lack thereof. Forget about their supposedly “zero emissions.” These are separate considerations.
The hard deck reality is that most people simply cannot afford electric cars – the least expensive of which (Nissan’s Leaf, reviewed here) starts at $30,000. The rest begin around $35,000 – and ascend from there.
Most people can’t afford a luxury car – which is what EVs are, in terms of what they cost. Which is at least twice as much as a current non-electric economy car.
But enormous numbers of these electrified luxury cars are going to be manufactured regardless of people’s ability to buy them – because of the willful refusal of the car industry to acknowledge the economic hard deck.
What will happen to all of these unaffordable EVs?
