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Denmark Is Killing Tesla and Other Electric Cars (bloomberg.com)
An anonymous shares an article: The electric car has dropped out of favor in the country that pioneered renewable energy. Sales in Denmark of Electrically Chargeable Vehicles (ECV), which include plug-in hybrids, plunged 60.5 percent in the first quarter of the year, compared with the first three months of 2016, according to latest data from the European Automobile Manufacturers Association (ACEA). That contrasts with an increase of nearly 80 percent in neighboring Sweden and an average rise of 30 percent in the European Union. Denmark, a global leader in wind power whose own attempt at an electric car in the early 1980s famously flopped, used to be enthralled with them. Its bicycle-loving people bought 5,298 of them in 2015, more than double the amount sold that year in Italy, which has a population more than 10 times the size of Denmark's. The figures suggest clean-energy vehicles still aren't attractive enough to compete without some form of subsidy. However, it turns out that those phenomenal sales figures had as much to do with convenience as with environmental concerns: electric car dealers were for a long time spared the jaw-dropping import tax of 180 percent that Denmark applies on vehicles fueled by a traditional combustion engine.
The data in the article is confusing - they talk about a 60,5% drop, yet they show a vastly more than 60,5% drop in their graph. Maybe the graph isn't a complete Q1?
Adding up the 2015 figures, I get around 4600 EVs sold. In the same year in Denmark, 206998 cars were sold total in Denmark, so 2,22% of new vehicle sales were EVs. In the US in 2015, 114248 PEVs were sold, versus 17,5m total, so 0,65%. So even if Denmark's EV sales dropped 60,5%, they'd only just be equaling that of the US.
We gotta go to a crappy town where I'm a hero.
Simple: it exists because people will pay. This is the same in every country, whether it's extreme registration fees, fuel taxes, or road taxes. In many European countries these revenues exceed the cost of road networks and is used to fund other governent programmes. If you raise income taxes or VAT, people will scream bloody murder. However if you increase taxes on cars a little, many people might even agree, especially since they are still under the impression that cars are a major contributor to pollution (which is false: in my densely populated country for instance, cars account for just 10% of CO2 and 15% NOx emissions, and their contribution to particulates has fallen steadily and is still fallen). It's greenwashed extortion.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
After subsidies, you can get a new electric car for $15K-$18K. Looking right now I see a Leaf is less than $17K, and I believe that gets 120 miles range, which is enough for the large majority of commuters.
There's also the minor issue that cars, especially Teslas, are expensive, and more so in Denmark with that minor tax tacked on. So how many people can really afford a $200K car that didn't already buy one last year? I wonder, about 176?
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
While they can achieve higher efficiency when operating only in their optimal power band, ICE vehicles typically operate at only about 20% efficiency in typical driving conditions. Meanwhile, a modern combined cycle natural gas plant will frequently achieve over 50% efficiency, and can even approach 60%. When combined with cogeneration (not an option for gasoline cars), efficiency can get into the 90s.
From an emissions point, this is also wrong. Compared to coal, gasoline wins in respect to some pollutants (PM, and would win on SOx except additional power generation requires additional scrubbing under EPA regulations), is a draw in regards to some (NOx) and gets blown away in others (VOCs, CO, etc). Compared to natural gas, it's no contest, gasoline loses, and badly. Also, centralized power stations emit their pollutants at altitude and in less densely populations, rather than at ground level in densely populated areas.
We gotta go to a crappy town where I'm a hero.