Rebates won’t get everyone to buy an electric car: SFU Professor
Posted March 24, 2015 11:00 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
VANCOUVER (NEWS1130) – What would it take for you to give up your car and buy an electric one? An SFU expert on consumer response to electric vehicle marketing believes stricter policies will encourage drivers to get around without having to fill up on gas.
Professor John Axsen with SFU’s School of Resource and Environmental Management says the province needs to do more than offer rebates (of up to $6,000) to get you to buy an electric car. After crunching the numbers, he predicts offering rebates will double the number of electric vehicles but that won’t mean you’ll be seeing them all over the road in the future.
“We’ve done a number of studies now that show an incentive program like this does have an effect. It could double the market share of electric vehicles. It’s just that doubling isn’t that big. If it is the goal to have a real transition towards electric mobility we need much stronger policies. So, something like an incentive program can double market share from say 1 per cent to 2 per cent, that is an impact…If we really want to get the this world where 10 per cent, 20 per cent and then eventually much more vehicles are electric we need something really serious to trigger that transition.”
He thinks BC should follow California which has a Zero Emission Vehicle Mandate.
“If we really want to have a world where a large number of people are driving around in electric vehicles and plug in hybrid vehicles, we need much stronger policies something like what California is doing with their Zero Emission Vehicle Mandate. It requires any auto companies that want to sell vehicles in California they have to sell a certain percentage of those vehicles as low or zero emissions vehicles like electric or hybrid…the beauty of that policy is that it then puts the incentive on the auto companies to market their vehicles and make their vehicles available and to build that market, using their own abilities and forces and ultimately car companies are a lot better at this at government.”
According to his research, he says a third of car buyers are willing to pay to go electric but they face barriers, for example, the type of cars they want aren’t always available.
