[esotericn]

Realistically, only wealthy people can afford new cars in general. It's not clear that an incentive is any less valuable to someone who can pay 40k for a car instead of 20k, money is money, saving it is going to skew decisions for anyone.

[riffraff]

people can afford to buy a new car and pay by instalments relatively easily, especially for small city cars which are common in Europe.

You need to have income, but you can get a car on a bluecollar salary, and an incentive of 10% on the price is significant.

If you're actually wealthy you'll want to buy a bigger car, and the same incentive is both less significant and less useful.

[kragen]

A "bluecollar salary" in Europe is enough to qualify as "wealthy"; that's why a significant number of people from my country have moved to Europe to work as waiters and kindergarten teachers and whatnot. There are lots of cars on the road here but they all belong to wealthy people or taxi drivers. And this is a middle-income country; in poor countries access to cars is even more limited.

[esotericn]

Definitionally a person who can spend 20K on a car when something serviceable is available for 2K is wealthy by some description. They have a good amount of disposable income.

I don't mean to claim that anyone who buys a new car is financially independent.

[mgoetzke]

Actually a new gas car for 20k EUR is definitely more expensive than a 40k Tesla over the years. Gas cars burn a lot of money over the years. And those expensive cars also then get cheaper to buy on the used car markets.

Then again Tesla is not hurting, they sell just about everything they can build.