The government wants to encourage more electric vehicles and has proposed a clean car discount for buyers of low emissions vehicles funded by a tax on those vehicles with high CO2 emissions.
The proposal would mean about $8,000 off the price of a new or near new imported electric vehicle. While the heaviest petrol and diesel polluters would cost $3000 more than the newly-imported ones.
Photo: 123RF
Known as a 'feebate' scheme, the proposal has been labelled draconian by the imported motor vehicle industry association, while the National Party claims it will cost taxpayers half a billion dollars in new taxes and won't be revenue neutral.
Sweden meanwhile introduced a feebate scheme last year, part of a suite of policies designed to help it achieve its target of a 70 percent reduction in emissions from domestic transport, compared with 2010 levels, by the end of next decade.
Jakob Lagercrantz is one of the architects of that scheme, and told Kathryn Ryan that low emissions vehicle sales in Sweden are soaring.
Lagercrantz is co-founder of the 2030 Secretariat, a coalition of private and public partners formed to keep the pressure on the Swedish transport sector to go fossil fuel free.
He's been in New Zealand to speak at the Expo EV World in Auckland and to meet government agencies.
He says Sweden’s similar scheme has been a game-changer.
“We've had it for about a year and the last month the sales of electric vehicles were twice as high as they were one year ago,” he says.
He believes there are similarities between New Zealand and Sweden, although says Sweden has a much larger fleet of EVs.
“Sweden is bigger and has more people but we have roughly the same amount of cars. So, you have about 14,000 electric vehicles in New Zealand that we have now 86,000 in Sweden and 10 percent of all new cars are now chargeable or electric cars.
“The big difference between New Zealand and Sweden is we don't import second hand cars like you do from Japan, Singapore or the UK. To a large extent we only buy new cars.”
And EVs are improving rapidly, he says. In Sweden VW is about to launch an EV Golf with a range of 400kms.
“One scheme is not enough, I mean you need to have a combination of schemes and you need to follow technical developments. Right now we see the ketchup effect, we are shaking the bottle for a long time and now finally we got lots of electric models coming onto the market. So now is the time to introduce a scheme [feebate] like that.”
The uptake of EVs had had no negative impact on the electricity grid there, he says.
“We have very clean electricity production, the same as New Zealand, and it is very stable, so this is actually not going to be much of a problem. It needs some planning but it's not going to be a problem.”
And biofuels are part of the mix in Sweden, he says.
“I don't live in a city, I live on a farm, I have to pull horse transport, I can't use an electric car for that today, in a couple of years maybe. But we need different options.
“Sweden, we are big on biofuels, so electric vehicles are maybe the most important, but biofuel is a very important combination that we use for certain types of transport.”
As for charging, New Zealand has a natural advantage too, he says.
“People live in houses to a large extent in New Zealand so you can charge at home - so it's a perfect society for electric vehicles.”
