Should governments spend taxpayers money promoting the electric vehicle market?

EV Small Talk
1

Over the last couple of years we have seen many governments around the world, including the US government and the UK government, introducing incentives for those looking to acquire electric vehicles. These take a variety of different forms including long term financial incentives, reduced taxation and indeed handing cash over to car manufacturers to reduce their prices. Is this a fair use of taxpayers money?

At this moment in time very few taxpayers will have possession of an electric vehicle even though sales continue to grow year by year. Is it therefore fair to use significant amounts of taxpayers money, often running into billions upon billions of dollars, to promote something that many of us may never use?

2

Hard to say, especially when we don’t even know if the incentives work. An alternate question for folks (just my personal curiosity): if states were to implement mileage-based user fees for electric vehicles to fulfill the role of the gas tax for non-EVs, would that disincentivize the purchase of these vehicles?

3

Personally I think that any mileage-based user fees would put many people off buying an electric vehicle because they would feel it was yet another tax scheme for the government.