Study: Point-of-sale EV rebates consumers favor may have saved $2 billion vs. tax credit

Purchase incentives are an essential device for rising EV adoption, however the present federal tax credit score will not be the simplest, based on a brand new George Washington University examine.

Buyers favor a rebate that is utilized on the level of sale—generally known as “cash on the hood”—to a delayed tax credit score, even when the credit score quantity is larger, the examine discovered.

Currently, new automobile consumers can get a federal tax credit score of as much as $7,500 for qualifying EVs or plug-in hybrids. But they have to wait till they file taxes to obtain that incentive, and since it is based mostly on federal taxes, some consumers might not qualify. The tax credit score additionally makes no distinction between rich automobile consumers and lower-income consumers which may depend on monetary incentives to buy an EV.

Car consumers surveyed for the examine “overwhelmingly” most popular rapid rebates, on common valuing them by $580, $1,450, and $2,630 greater than gross sales tax exemptions, tax credit, or tax deductions, respectively, researchers mentioned in a press launch. That choice was even stronger for low-income households, consumers with decrease budgets, and used-car consumers (who do not presently qualify for the federal EV tax credit score), researchers mentioned.

“If you gave the inducement to automobile consumers as money on the hood, our examine discovered that you can decrease the subsidy by nearly $1,500,” Laura Roberson, an engineering management and systems engineering PhD student at GW and lead author of the study, said in a statement. “That’s how a lot folks worth immediacy.”

With consumers prepared to just accept a decrease quantity for an instantaneous rebate, researchers estimate the federal authorities may have saved $2 billion—or $1,440 per qualifying automobile bought—if the subsidy accessible from 2011 to 2019 was delivered as an instantaneous rebate moderately than a tax credit score.

2023 Toyota bZ4X Limited AWD

Rebates would in the end save the federal government (and taxpayers) cash, and distribute incentives in a extra equitable means, as a result of incentives would not be tethered to wealth. Which would have gone a great distance towards addressing points with the present federal EV tax credit score.

Designed to kickstart the EV market moderately than maintain it, the present tax credit score begins to section out as soon as a producer has bought 200,000 qualifying autos. General Motors and Tesla have already reached that restrict, and Toyota is about to. Price and earnings caps aren’t half of the present tax credit score both, though they have been included in a few of final 12 months’s proposed expansions.

We’ve additionally argued up to now, {that a} rebate would make sense to a far wider vary of consumers, and the Obama administration expressed help for rebates in 2011. Yet even the latest discussions of a tax credit score overhaul have not prolonged to switching the inducement to a rebate.