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by rullopat 638 days ago
So the only way to push all people to buy EV right now is… distort the market with taxes on combustion engine vehicles.
4 comments

Alternatively you could look at it as pricing in previously overlooked externalities of ICE vehicles.
Look at some of the research on the health costs of ICE emissions. Even before you try to assess the cost to the local and global environment you end up with annual death rates in the hundreds of thousands and many billions of dollars annually in medical expenses and quality of life reduction. A tax on pollution would be the best way to handle this since you could pour the money raised into healthcare and environmental remediation.

https://theicct.org/new-study-quantifies-the-global-health-i...

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4243514/

The market distortion is the price of the combustion vehicle not including the costs of what comes out of the tailpipe.
Even without taxes, I'm pretty sure that for most use cases, a good electric vehicle will cost a lot less in the long term when you factor in maintenance in addition to 'fuel' costs.