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Comment by causi | Hacker News Reader

Also, all the options (lump sums and trade-ins) are capped to 40% of the price of the bike. So you'd have to trade your car for a 6000+ euros electric bike to get the full 3000 euros

What possible reason do they have for that? All it does is encourage people to buy a more expensive bike.

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No it doesn’t. It makes it easier to buy a more expensive bike, but it’s still more expensive.

A $2000 ebike will cost you $1200. A $4000 ebike will cost you $2400. A $6000 ebike will cost you $3600.

The reason it is capped at a percentage of the bike's purchase price is to limit abuse. If people have to spend a good chunk of their own money they may think twice, if it's a free ebike everyone will take the offer and immediately resell the bike (yay free money).

I'm any case 4k is huge as most ebikes are cheaper than that... I suspect this is just to generate headline with a big number...

How is it a free bike if they have to give up their car to get it?

If I have an old car I need to replace I can now have a free ebike, and then I buy my new car...

Or you could sell your car, or trade in your car (+ money) for another car

It's limited to one per person anyways, it's not like the mafia was going to buy 500k cheap cars and get 500k brand new free electric bikes.

You could buy a really cheap, barely functional car for 1k. You trade it in, get a 6k bike for free, and then you sell the bike.

According to an earlier post, the cap is 40% of both bike and car price. If you trade in a car for 200, your max ebike refund is 80.

As linked in the thread, you must have been the owner of the car for 1 year to be eligible.

You might have a low value car. I just sold my old car for 600€. If I had an offer like this, and I could swap it for an expensive e-bike, even when paying for the 60% of the bike my car would have doubled its "value".

> All it does is encourage people to buy a more expensive bike.

No. All it does is the 2000€ bike is now sold for 3000€.

> All it does is encourage people to buy a more expensive bike

Virtue signalling and a half disguised way of increasing sales and consumerism

If they really cared about climate they'd find proper ways (more/cheaper public transport, state sponsored bicycle sharing, &c.). This is "green capitalism", just slap an "electric" sticker on it and continue with the good old ways

Replacing cars with bicycles is one of the most "proper" ways of decarbonizing transportation.

But apparently only expensive and new electric bikes, not regular bikes or used bikes. And you have to make 900 euros a months, otherwise you're not worthy of assistance, but also you have to pay 60% out of pocket....

It's certainly far from perfect, but it's still replacing cars with bicycles.

I doubt many people would actually replace cars with bicycles.

It's not the same use case and in congested places like central Paris people who need a motor have scooters.

Feedback stats on these schemes are important but rarely conducted or published in a transparent way as the government obviously has a vested interest in claiming that they work great.

Since you need to get rid of a car to get the subsidy and you have to pay a substantial part of the cost of the bicycle yourself, even if you wanted to scrap a car to buy a new one you probably expect to use the electric bike at least often enough to justify paying the subsidized price for it.

The point of my previous comment is that I don't see many people swapping their car for an ebike. That would be the key metric to judge this scheme (alongside the actual cost to taxpayers...)

I am sure some people will use the scheme but probably because they were thinking of getting an ebike anyway and a replacing their car for a new one...

It's the usual and main issue with those schemes: they are political decisions and don't always make practical or economical sense.

Sure, if you want one bycicle per person on the family, and everyone enjoys getting soaked in water during Winter.

Yeah, but the bottom of the market where there's no slack isn't where you start.

Kicking the poors while they're down and/or pulling the rug out from under people who are just barely doing better is not a sustainable way of decarbonizing society and it seems like every decarbonizing policy does just that. We can get away with a few such policies but when they're all like that it doesn't work.

This is literally state sponsored bicycle use. What would you suggest that 'state sponsored bicycle sharing' should consist of?

> What would you suggest that 'state sponsored bicycle sharing' should consist of

Instead of renting an uber&co bikes (companies which use public infrastructure yet pay virtually no local tax) you'd rent state owned bikes, parked on official bike parkings. It could be part of your existing public transportation package &c.

It really doesn't take a genius to see how the current mayhem could be improved on so many levels

France already has that in all of the major cities. The subscription is heavily subsidised if you are poor.

This is the next step when you already have that.

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