The grant needs to go!

The majority of cars in the whole of Ireland never or rarely do more than 60km in one journey...

And yeah, I'd like 1000km range too, but if you're poor, you have to make do with what you can afford. And not come onto a forum to whinge that you are poor and that you need your cancer fuel subsidised.

How many €2k Fluence are out there for people to buy?

Getting a one-off good deal is not the same as it being readily available for the masses to buy. And if the masses were buying them, you would not have got that for €2k.

The purpose of the grant (as with any incentive) is to increase demand. There are no demand side issues at the moment. It's all supply side issues. Given that the issues are on the supply side, the manufacturers are doing their best to maximise their profit. The grant system we have doesn't incentivise the supply of cheaper cars. It is incentivising supplying cars at just under 60k to get the grant and the highest profit. This is resulting in heavier cars with larger batteries than required being imported, reducing the environmental benefit of buying an EV. The grant should be restructured and the maximum value of the car should be dropped significantly. It also should have a phased reduction (same as the VRT relief has), possibly a full grant up to €30,000 reducing to 0 at €40,000 with the VRT relief continuing as is at the full relief up to €40,000 reducing to 0 at €50,000

There could also be some changes to corporation tax on the profit from importing lower priced cars.

Keeping the grant as is is going to result in a market with a very small number of reasonably priced second hand EVs available for quite a long time. There are a very limited number of lower priced second hand EVs in the country, and the new cars being registered are, for the most part, not in the same price category. Out of the ~8200 new EVs registered this year, there probably isn't 1500 that were less than €40k. It will take a long time for the price of those cars to reduce to the levels that a lot of second hand car buyers are willing to spend.

Without some sort of change to the grant, we're going to see a lot of smaller ICE cars being kept for longer, as there aren't sufficient numbers of small EVs to replace them.

Crypto mining rigs are a 100% efficient way of heating your house. Also done from the grid which is up to 75% renewable and from my 11kwp solar array which is 100% renewable. Before that I heated my house with gas, which is less than 100% efficient and 0% renewable

I produce 11MWh of electricity per year from solar PV. An average Irish house uses 3MWh per year of electricity, an average EV also uses about 3MWh per year.

Please educate yourself a bit more before making any insinuating comments that I burn vast quantities of electricity, with that not so hidden false accusation of using fossil fuels to create that electricity that I use.

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I don't disagree with any of that, fact is though that the majority of cars in Ireland (not just in Dublin) rarely do more than 60-80km per day. Obviously if you are a sales rep doing 500km per day very often, then a 10 year old Leaf is not the best choice of car for you 😂

(not that any sales rep ever wanted to be seen dead in a €5k, 10 year old car anyway)

The grant is taxpayer's money, and at the moment is not providing good value to the taxpayer. It is important that the money is used to get the best benefit for the country as a whole. There are no issues with getting buyers for any of the EVs on the market at the moment, and it is unlikely that there would be issues if the grant was removed. The money would be better used in 1. expanding public charging and 2. reducing the carbon intensity of the electrical grid.

The grant was necessary when EVs were in their infancy, as was the free chare point at home and free public charging. It was there to offset the extra cost of buying an EV and the uncertainty on residual values. The market is sufficiently mature that a lot of the incentives are not necessary. What is necessary is greater certainty on the availability of en-route charge points for longer distances and charge points for those without their own driveway/dedicated parking.

Reducing the carbon intensity of the electrical grid has benefits for all electricity users in the country as it helps to reduce the overall cost of electricity, and particularly benefits higher usage customers (which includes those with EVs). Given the price trajectory for oil, reducing the price of electricity effectively works as an incentive for EV ownership.

Tbh, I get really annoyed at when the EU commission and governments of Europe talk about transitioning to renewables but then sandbagging the whole process

Let's be honest, the governments of the EU, and wider Europe, could transition to 100% renewables within a year if enough government money was thrown at the problem.

They could just throw money at manufacturers to scale up production of wind turbines, solar panels and batteries. They could throw grants at homeowners and businesses to install as much renewables as possible and make it as easy as possible to bring new wind and solar farms up and running

There's no shortage of money floating around, so it's hardly like they can't afford it.

Yes, it's bad economics in a free market sense. But at some point people are going to have to acknowledge that this is a real emergency, and in emergencies the normal rules of spending need to be set aside for a while

I've always been opposed to all grants. Period. If there is one going, I will take it though. And so should everyone else.

You'll make a good populist politician. People shouldn't be penalised when things get tough. Shure give them a few hundred quid towards their electricity use. Shure give them a few hundred towards their diesel bill. Cancel the water charges. Keeps them voting for us. My bollix. We need to reduce our use of fossil fuels now more than ever. This is going to be painful for everyone, it's going to hurt, we'll just have to take our medicine. We'll get out of it better. And you guessed it, I have zero ambition (nor talent) to become a politician myself ;-)

The head in the sand approach, shure it'll pass is pathetic though. Our children and grandchildren will speak with disgust about most people of our generation doing nothing when it was needed the most. That's what I call the I'm alright jack stuff. Everyone knows if we don't do a lot more soon, we might be ok for our lives, but our children and grandchildren will have an awful time. Because of us.

Kinda like how those moving to Diesels a decade ago got the chape tax while everyone with cars older than 2008 got shafted...the majority of which were petrol drivers.

That's an interesting and alternative take on it, liamog. I'd say you are not wrong if our leaders really are as clever / tuned in as you reckon they are.

Korean cars are the best built cars in the world and have been for a good few years. Although you wouldn't class them as "premium", but that might come.

Most of our electronics are made in China, including "premium" phones such as the Apple iPhone 14 max pro gold XL or whatever their flagshap is called now 😁 Higher end Chinese cars will be regarded as premium in the same way as iPhones in a few years time.

So? Apple are American. Yet most of the Samsung and Apple phones are made in China.