Do people making less than 150k buy 100k cars? I don't have a good sense for how Americans budget their vehicle purchases.

Should they? Probably not in most cases. Do they? Absolutely.

The real killer here though is the limit. If you're making $160k, that $7000 is still a real incentive. Can you afford it without, sure, but if we're trying to incentivize EVs then everyone should get the incentive... sometimes wealthy people are wealthy because they save money whenever possible, so the incentive will still move the needle on EV adoption.

Like all incentives, it should be on a sliding scale. Frankly, fall benefit would start to fall off after 100k income and/or some vehicle value cutoff, maybe 50k. Beyond either value, you'd then decay to upper limits linearly (easier for the consumer to understand) with upper income level 160-180k range ish, and upper vehicle value maybe 100k.

All numbers subject to change!

absolutely, and people making less than 50k buy 50k cars. Plus, there are also a lot of people in low cost of living areas that hapily drop cash on cars.

I was visiting my hometown where houses are 200k and lots of households make 100k-200k/yr. All the driveways were full of new trucks, SUVs, and boats.

I'm pretty sure a lot of people making less than 150k buy $60k F-150s.

There’s a big difference between $60k and 100k.

My point is Cybertruck starts at $60, not $100k, and likely a majority of sales will happen closer to $60k than $100k. But I'd venture to guess that a majority of people buying even the $100k variant do qualify for the credit.

> American's often don't budget.

Just random drive-by comment hating a particular nationality...

I'm American. Most of my friends/family don't even pretend to budget. Looking at reports of the debt loads of Americans, it's pretty clear that we overspend. So if we do budget, we don't follow it.

> I'm American.

irrelevant

> Most of my friends/family

your comment was about "Americans" generally. Not about Americans you know.

pointlessly divisive, stereotyping nationality, and without merit. exactly the type of comment we need less of on HN. I replied because it prevents you from deleting the comment.

EDIT: ah, I see that they are now replying with a random article found after hastily searching for sources to confirm their bias with commentary from * squints * a "financial therapist." A CNBC article that is a submarine (as coined by PG[1]), meant to advertise OppLoans.

don't believe me? see all the articles written by CNBC for OppLoans:

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=site%3Acnbc.com+OppLoans

Well then.... my mistake. Anything to justify your comment. Carry on...

[1] http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html

I'm clearly not bothered by the ability to not delete it. Someone commented about American's budgeting habits. I responded.

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/04/29/its-ok-to-not-follow-a-budge...

73% of American's say they don't budget. My comment is with merit.

lol, I didn’t realize suggesting Americans don’t budget would even be controversial, let alone considered an attack. Attacking people with the rules isn’t constructive. If you think my comment isn’t appropriate, just flag it.