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this post was submitted on 26 Feb 2024
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Btw, in Norway 92% of new car sales in January were electric cars, and apparently predictions for February are even higher.
When the infrastructure is there, people appear to have little to no qualms buying electric cars.
Norway has a range of subsidies worth up to half the price of the vehicle and home upgrades plus tax exemptions worth another 25% on top of that.
Which can mean a brand new EV is the same price as an old secondhand ICE.
Incentives like that are a lot easier your entire national population is smaller than some cities.
The reason why Europe can pull off progressive reforms has nothing to do with population or geography, Europe is bigger than the US on both fronts. It has to do with political will.
I only meant to say that many of the things that might put people off buying electric cars, like range concerns etc. can be alleviated.
Even with subsidies and incentives it was slow going in the beginning, before people gained trust in the infrastructure and realized electric could be a real and practical alternative.
I didn't mean to be an asshole, sorry.
You weren’t an asshole
How does a smaller population make it easier to pay those incentives? Less people also means less tax income and vice versa
Tax rates in general are higher there, and not all taxation scales with population (corporate tax, for instance). It also depends on how the government allocates the money it spends—Norway doesn't have the US's ridiculously inflated military budget.
The issue is how the US is spending tax money then and not the population
Country size has a huge impact on the ability to make sweeping changes to infrastructure and public opinion. A country the size of one US state can do whatever they want and it's not going to take 50 years to implement.
South Korea has broadband everywhere? Sure, they are a rich country the size of Indiana and lacing all of that fiber is trivial compared to the entire land mass of the US, or worse, Russia or China. Governmental demands scale much differently the larger the country, and tax doesn't scale in a 1:1 manner to its land mass.
If you want to make changes like that, you tell each state they're supposed to e.g. upgrade everyone to fiber and then the local government of each state handles it. I thought that was the whole point of having those states.
Maybe you should split your country up into smaller, independent regions that can govern more effectively.
You could call them "States"
I don’t buy this logic at all. A larger population also means a much larger taxpayer base, so it evens out. US can offer incentives like this but chooses not to. Half the population seems to feel threatened by any incentives. Then going down to state levels: some states do offer additional incentives and some don’t. The population size isn’t an economical difference, it’s a political difference
Norway is 1/30th the size of the US and everyone lives in the bottom half, so traveling your country is like traveling a state in the US, and not one of the big states. That makes it really easy to have smaller range EV'S a viable option and requires orders of magnitudes less public charging stations. Everything is easy when your entire country only consists of a bit over five million people.
Just because the borders are drawn around a bigger or smaller area, doesn't change how long people need to drive when they wanna get somewhere
How they got rich doesn't change their sales figures. Other countries that got rich in different ways could apply the same techniques.
No, you are right. But I do think most countries do use the same techniques, the problem is they can't give subsidies for up to 50% of the new car price. It is simply not sustainable. There are also not enough cars to go around even if they did and even if most people had enough money burning in their pocket for a new car, which they don't.
I just find the how they got rich ironic..