France Cuts EV Incentives for Wealthy Households
oilprice.com
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Obviously incentives matter, but this doesn't seem particularly severe policy change.
We're in the market for a new-to-us car (in the US). The used EV tax credit is not available to us, so we're going to end up buying a car with a gas engine (likely a hybrid) to join our existing BEV [bought because of the 2014 tax credit]. I can't really complain, as the used EV credit is relatively new and if government policy says we do or don't get a credit, we incorporate that into our decision process. (If the overall population didn't do this, incentive policies like this would have no effect, so it's good that they do in order to nudge marginal decisions one way or the other.)
Subsidies support Chinese battery manufacturers. EVs can easily float on their own, no engine to make, only batteries to build!
Why so the USA?
It either works for your use case or it doesn't.
In the UK since approx the Ukraine war it's been significantly more expensive to run an EV (per mile) unless you have a home charger.
But realistically everyone I know who buys new cars buys what they want and a few grand doesn't really influence it.
These means tested measures seem like they sometimes don't stay targeted on the goal.
Easy- it's because electric cars as a class of product aren't there yet (every company with significant EV production capacity is busy producing late-alpha-quality products except for Teslas that are early-beta). Therefore, consumers need an incentive to buy and manufacturers need an incentive to create cars that are worse in most ways in the hopes that they'll be able to fund the development of technology that would actually make EVs viable for the average consumer.
As far as the politics go, the wing of the government that believes electric cars are the future spent all its money on a public health measure (the success and necessity of that is out of scope), and relevantly for France industrial inputs got more expensive because the US finally got the war on the European border they'd been trying to ignite for the past 10 years.
Environmental policies are ultimately luxuries; and in a new era of austerity after 3 years of unrestrained spending it's not a surprise that subsidies are disappearing.