this post was submitted on 04 Jan 2024
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Isn't the used car market much bigger than the new car market? Afaik in Germany the biggest part of new cars is sold to companies that give it to their employees and after a couple of years they sell it and that's when most other people would buy that car - I think it's time for countries to incentivize early adopters to sell their electric vehicle for a newer model and create that kind of used car market.
Not sure how it works in the us but here the group of people actually buying fabric new cars is rather small compared to the amount of cars in circulation and the trick is getting them to sell their car every couple of years
In the US, public transportation is so bad that a lot of used cars come from rental companies. People fly somewhere and then literally need to rent a car to get anywhere from the airport. The rental companies tend to buy new cars and sell them around 40k miles.
Another big source of used cars is from people leasing their vehicles, then upgrading instead of buying out. It’s very common to find 3-year-old cars that just came off lease.
Both of those should be easy to incentivize - require rental agencies to maintain a high percentage of electric in their fleet, and make leasing electric cars significantly cheaper than leasing ridiculous SUVs - either by subsidizing them or by taxing the leases on high-mpg ICE vehicles.