See, there's a decade long debate brewing here.
Carbon Tax=Complicated.
EV incentives=Easy
Everyone copy Norway...done.
I'm not advocating copying Norway. What works there isn't necessarily going to work everywhere else. Norway has a lot of money from their oil business they have decided to invest in public works plus they have a well established grid based on hydroelectric, which is unique to Norway.
Tax incentives aren't necessarily the best idea. The $7500 federal tax rebate is nice in the US, but it can't be fully used by people who aren't already making a lot of money. I don't pay $7500 a year in federal income tax to be rebated and my income is above the American average.
"The Model T was introduced on October 1, 1908. It had the steering wheel on the left, which every other company soon copied. The entire engine and transmission were enclosed; the four cylinders were cast in a solid block; the suspension used two semi-elliptic springs. The car was very simple to drive, and easy and cheap to repair. It was so cheap at $825 in 1908 ($21,650 today) (the price fell every year) that by the 1920s, a majority of American drivers had learned to drive on the Model T.[SUP][13]"
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1908-1920's=what...like 15 years?
Now we have computers and robots and gigafactories...not to mention major players focussing massive resources on EV development (VW, Apple). Look how far Tesla has come since launching the Model S in 2012. The transition to sustainable transport is about to become exponential. EV incentives are helpful right now, for the next couple of years, but will not be required for very long. Huge advances are coming very soon. The entire auto industry as we know it is about to get seriously disrupted.
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"Do you remember owning a Walkman? Listening to compact discs? That was the most common way to enjoy music about a decade ago. Now you use your phone, and nobody has a Walkman.
Remember watching movies on DVDs? Remember going to Blockbuster, et.al. to rent a DVD? That was common just a decade ago. Now you likely have shelved the DVD player, lost track of your DVD collection and stream all your entertainment. Bluckbuster, infamously, went bankrupt.
Do you remember when you never left home without your personal computer? That was the primary tool for digital connectivity just 6 years ago. Now almost everyone in the developed world (and coming close in the developing) carries a smartphone and/or tablet while the laptop sits idle. Laptop sales have declined for 5 years, and a lot faster than all the computer experts predicted.
Market shifts happen faster than predicted, and impact the market more than expected"
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First off there were only 194,000 cars and 4000 trucks on American roads in the US in 1908 and that had risen to a little over 8 million cars and 1.1 million trucks by 1920. Compare that to 128 million cars and 72 million trucks by 1995 (from the latest chart I could find).
https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/ohim/summary95/mv200.pdf
Car ownership outside the US and Europe was almost 0 in 1908, but it has grown even more since 1920 than in the US.
Cars in 1920 were also staggeringly more simple than they are today. The Model S is somewhat less complicated than a modern ICE, but it's complexity is many times a Model T. It has many more safety features, computers monitoring everything, even the tires are much more complex to engineer than the Model T.
Comparing the electronics market to the car market only goes so far. Electronic devices have a lot higher percentage of software/firmware to hardware than cars do. The electronics business, especially the cutting edge electronics business, is a high margin market and cars a low margin market. A relatively small factory can turn out millions of copies of an electronic device in a very short time, but it takes many very large factories to produce millions of cars.
Innovations like smart phones and iPods also did not require major changes to the supporting infrastructure to take off. Both were made better by support from changes to the infrastructure, but they became hits before the infrastructure was updated. That isn't so for cars with a new energy source. Support for the new fuel source needs to be built out before the general public are going to adopt it.
The softer the technology (ie the more it relies on software and less on hardware) the quicker the transition that can be made. You write the software to support the device once, and then copy it as many times as you need. For about $1 billion investment in manufacturing, you can crank out millions of phones or other similar devices a year. For building cars, it requires a $5 billion battery factory and $5 billion final assembly plant for each increment of 500,000 cars/year. (Tesla got their current factory for $40 million, but that was fire sale prices, building that same factory new would be $5 billion of more.)
The mainstream car companies laughed at Tesla because they assumed they were being naive trying to build cars in Silicon Valley. They knew the differences between building computing devices and building cars and figured Tesla didn't know this. Many still think Tesla doesn't know this, but somehow survived because of government help or fanatical following, or something. Looking at Tesla's plans, it's obvious to me they do know the differences between building cars and electronics. They are applying what works from the electronics business, but they also realize building cars is far more hardware intensive than anything being done in Silicon Valley.
On top of all these difficulties are a few of the largest industries in the world resisting these changes. The top 10 of the Fortune 500 contains 3 oil companies and 2 car companies. There are also some very large foreign companies resisting change.
Replacing the more than 1 billion cars on the road in the world today will take a lot of time and capital investment. It will be slowed down by players resisting change, but even with no resistance, it would still take at least 2 decades.
