Incentives work

Huh. It turns out that incentives to buy EVs and lower their price relative to fossil vehicles work:

The first month of the "feebate" saw a huge spike in electric vehicle sales, which nearly quadrupled.

There were 1944 pure EV and hybrid light vehicle new registrations during July, according to new registration stats released by the Ministry of Transport - Te Manatū Waka.

That compares to 521 the previous month, and 483 in July last year.

The Herald and Stuff articles also have a breakdown of vehicle types, which oddly does not match Ministry of Transport figures. From table 2a here, the real numbers are: 759 new light pure electric, 538 used light pure electric, 430 new light plug-in hybrid and 207 used light plug-in hybrid. In a month.

Its still a small proportion of new registrations - 7.6% of new vehicles and 5.2% of newly-registered used ones. But that's triple and double the previous rates respectively. If this policy produces a step-change resulting in faster adoption, we can consider it a success.

The next step of course is to get those dirty, inefficient, dangerous utes off the roads. And that should hopefully start happening when the "fee" part of "feebate" kicks in next year.