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Comment by grandalf | Hacker News Reader

> only when they are "new"

Ahh yes, they must benefit the environment only when new :)

Incentives on used car sales would be redundant, because the incentive gets baked into the price of the used car. A new Tesla gets a $7,500 tax credit when purchased in the US right now. If you turn around and sell it, you'll have to discount it by about $7,500 to account for the fact that you're competing with new cars that have that incentive.

Redundant yes, but nonetheless helpful to the environmental goals of the policy. It's just a subsidy on green products, which would increase demand for green products whether they are new or used.

How would you avoid loopholes, for example getting a free subsidy without doing anything of interest by "selling" your car to a friend and then buying it back from him again?

Thinking only of the environmental impact, I'd expect any new car regardless of energy source to be far worse than a used car.

Given the increased prices in the used car market (arising in part due to better durability and quality), I think I might be able to make an interesting argument for incentives towards purchasing used cars as being better for the environment than incentives for purchasing brand-new electric cars.

Incentives on new vehicle sales can change the fleet mix. I don't see how incentives on used sales can do that (there would be some more focus on resale value, but people already consider that).

I think in the US we would get the most mileage out of reforming CAFE to make it less friendly to daily driver trucks.

Much of the total environmental impact of a car is in the initial manufacturing. The idea would be to increase the average age the fleet. It is plausible that this might actually have more of an environmental impact than increasing mean fuel efficiency. However, I doubt subsidy would actually defer the age vehicles are scrapped unless it is structured to encourage certain types of repairs. Implicitly this already happens somewhat with registration and property taxes taking into account market price and in some states car age, so perhaps a cross state study could be done to assess impact across states empirically.

Yeah, I assume that people are already mostly making economically sensible choices with used cars, so incentives there would mostly just shift prices.

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