I mean, I personally disagree with this approach as I love driving and buy new cars, but I can see and understand why they do it that way. Denmark has extremely well developed public transport and most people get along without cars just fine.
Nowadays car ownership is popular enough that I'm not sure you could successfully introduce such a tax if people were not already used to it existing, and used to current new-car prices. When it was introduced, cars were seen as a rarer luxury than they are now, so a luxury tax was not too unpopular, and many people were also swayed by arguments that they had a significant negative social impact, on things like pollution and traffic and injuries, that should be paid for by taxing them [1]. But since it exists, if you cut it, you have to either raise some other tax, or cut some spending program, to account for the revenue; and you probably also have to build more roads and parking to account for the extra cars. That kind of change isn't so popular, and cars (especially new cars) are still culturally seen as not quite a necessity, so keeping the not-that-loved new-car tax remains less bad politically than the alternatives. Though it being lowered from 180% to 150% is a sign that consensus around it is not as strong as it once was, and I wouldn't be surprised to see more incremental cuts in the future.
[1] E.g. one 2009 analysis found that, even accounting for all the taxes, cars still have a 15% negative impact (costing society $1.15 for each $1.00 paid by car owners): http://www.copenhagenize.com/2012/10/danish-180-tax-on-cars-...
So a $20k car is $45k? What the #(%^@! ???