The tax on cars is largely for environmental/societal reasons. Pollution is an expensive, damaging externality for society largely caused by cars; the infrastructure for a car culture is VERY expensive to maintain; car-dependent cities are less attractive to live in.

A single-digit sales tax or registration fee does not cover these costs to society caused by car owners. Therefore, these costs must be covered by the general fund: from income, payroll, and business taxes. These all apply equally whether or not you own a car, so if you don't buy a car, you're still paying for the environmental cost of having one but not getting the benefits.

Denmark has done a smart thing by placing high taxes on cars. Reasonable taxation policy helps make this decision more rational. The flat tax usually makes sense because cheap cars are likely to be low-powered sub-compacts, which have a smaller impact, while expensive luxury cars are more likely to be high-powered, heavy, large vehicles.

But EVs (and hybrids, to a lesser extent) break this model. They are expensive, but environmentally friendly. It makes sense to encourage their adoption through tax breaks. That is not a shift of wealth from the poor to the rich, it's an intelligent exception in a model intended to shift costs away from all of society to the source of those costs.

> But EVs (and hybrids, to a lesser extent) break this model. They are expensive, but environmentally friendly.

Not quite. EVs reduce direct pollution, but there are still a lot of negative externalities. There are obvious ones relating to the manufacture and also to then still requiring energy.

But car culture itself has all sorts of issues, no matter the drive train: it encourages bad urbanism and sprawl (with large environmental impact), encourages inefficient land use via extensive parking, it taxes the infrastructure, it encourages bad health, and also some direct accidents.

"environmentally friendly" here means shifting pollution from the rich to the poor, i.e. from our western European cities to the countries where all the materials needed to produce the batteries and light-weight chassis are mined: http://www.bbc.com/news/business-19830232

Myth: The Tesla uses a lot of graphite in their battery, which contributes to China’s pollution problem.

Actually: The logic here is: “Tesla batteries use graphite; the world’s biggest source of graphite is in China; China has terrible pollution; therefore, Tesla is partially responsible for China’s pollution.” Except when I did some digging, I learned that Tesla uses synthetic graphite made mostly in Japan and Poland, and that the average Model S uses 100kg of it. That 100kg lasts for ten years, so the amount of graphite used to make a Model S is similar to the amount you’d use if you had a few barbecues a year.

There are pollution issues related to rare earth materials, and aluminium also requires a lot of energy.

But the big issue is still car culture and related energy waste, urban development and health issues.

Why the downvotes? Building and maintaining big roads, bridges, parking spaces has a huge social and environmental impact compared to increasing public transportation.

Public transportation is preferable to cars, but let us not paint electric cars as having any more negative externalities than their internal combustion brethren.

(The steel/aluminum/plastics of a car's exterior/interior/chassis are shared by cars regardless of drive train and still the overall impact of those materials dwarfs the environmental impact of battery technologies.)

> let us not paint electric cars as having any more negative externalities than their internal combustion brethren.

I wrote:

> EVs reduce direct pollution, but there are still a lot of negative externalities.

Sorry, I wasn't specifically directing that comment at you. There are a lot of people that will read what you wrote and assume you mean there are more negative externalities than the equivalent internal combustion car. Certainly you see that sort of talk/mythology a lot lately. I read your comment that way at first, but realized that was not what you had meant, but I can certainly see people downvoting it for assuming that is what you meant.

People don't like to be reminded that buying mansions with solar shingles and electric sports cars are far more about making consumers feel good than about meaningfully saving the planet in any sense.

Trickle down environmentalism is just like regular trickle down economics.

It's a digression, the topic is brought up in nearly every HN thread where somebody mentions the word "car," the ensuing discussions generally have the character of a religious debate, and that comment brings nothing new to the discussion. Being correct isn't enough to make a comment worthwhile.

ETA: For what it's worth, I think the downvotes on this comment are fair too. It doesn't need to be reiterated that tired, off-topic comments are tired and off-topic every time somebody makes one. I answered because I feel bad when I see somebody confused, but this is another example of a comment that probably deserves to be downvoted even though it's correct.

Then you should downvote the GP claiming that EVs should receive taxes subsidies becayse they "are environmentally friendly".

"there are still a lot of negative externalities"

True. but luckily most people don't commute by car here in Denmark, bike infrastructure is close to perfect. And most energy is renewable, so it's not as bad as it could have been.

> car-dependent cities are less attractive to live in

That's a nice rationalizing lie we like to tell ourselves; they are not nice to live in, but we vastly prefer them to be that way and get very, very angry if something is not car-accessible.

What people want is car accessibility for their car in particular, but none of the pesky traffic that results from other people having cars. In other words, a fantasy.

No we don't. Danish people are supposed to be the happiest on earth, and Copenhagen is definitely not a car-dependent city.

Speaking more generally, I'd say few cities in Europe fit your description. Within the city limits I think people pretty much expect cars to be the least practical mode of transport. Very few shops have parking lots, and getting around is very slow. It's probably true in the US though.

London is not a wonderful place to live in any more (immo) but would be infinitely worse if it required a car to move around usefully.

Thankfully the one thing that this place gets right is the range and organisation of Public Transport.

This is why I like to remind people of Tesla's true innovation: finding government tax credits and giving consumers a way to spend them on Tesla.

This comment makes no sense. Tesla doesn't find government credits and build a car accordingly. Tesla makes an electric car. Government, which represents their tax base, had decided to provide tax incentives to encourage EV sales. These are mutually exclusive. No one is stopping GM from converting their entire fleet to electric and take advantage. If this is the only innovation, it should also be relatively easy for anyone to start electric car company and start making money. I would encourage you to start one

Yep. These sort of new vehicle EV incentives are pointless hand outs to car companies and auto dealer associations, funded by the tax dollars of citizens that are often too poor to afford to buy a new car in the first place.

A more effective policy at encouraging the growth of the EV sector would be a road pricing system where non-EV cars pay higher fees.

This sort of policy would have the added bonus of incentivizing people into public transit and active transportation, which is ultimately better for the environment than buying an EV car.

"Also, giving tax breaks on luxury cars means shiftig wealth from the poor to the rich."

Not quite ...

If you taxed poor people to subsidize luxury cars (a regressive tax) then you would indeed shift wealth from the "poor" to the "rich".

However, if you tax rebate the "rich" to subsidize luxury cars you are instead shifting less wealth from rich to poor than you used to.

Maybe you should or should not do these things - I'm not going to debate that here - but I think that distinction is important and interesting ...

Not possible. The poor pay very little in taxes (the bottom 40% pay less than 5% of income taxes collected), and the rich pay most of them (the top 5% pay 55% of income taxes collected).

Yes, it puzzles me that my government sponsors people who fancy changing their car for an EV up to 10000 € (!) per EV (and considering the prices of EVs, they have to be rather wealthy to afford them even with the sponsoring), while cutting welfare for any stupid reason for people who have no other income (yearly welfare being around 5000-6000€...).

Giving away money worth 2 years of welfare to people who don't need money and just want to dump a car that still perfectly works sounds just crazy to me.

Yes, rolling back the tax discount on EVs should remove the last fragment of the fig leaf that those taxes have any environmental purpose whatsoever.

Cars in general are bad for the environment. The discount was about being quite a bit less bad, but EVs are still bad.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14536854

That may be the case, but the Danish vehicle tax has not made a meaningful dent in neither car ownership nor usage.

If it's an import tax, it only applies to cars imported from outside the EU. I don't know if Denmark has any car factories, but there are plenty of affordable cars being produced in the EU.

I had a look, Denmark only have small boutique manufacturers eg: http://www.zenvoautomotive.com/en/specs/

It could have had a factory for a foreign brand, though if I had to guess, I would expect that they don't have one. Still, Denmark is an EU member, so imports of German cars should be free.

But as I understand, it's not really an import fee but a registration fee, which probably means you also have to pay it for domestically manufactured cars.

>it's not really an import fee but a registration fee

Indeed, it is payed even if you live in Denmark, go buy a car in Germany, drive it back to Denmark yourself, and want to use it there.

Its not an import tax, its a registration tax, for getting danish plates etc. We have a seperate sales tax/VAT/import tax of 25%. If you import a car from inside the EU, you will pay the same taxes.