Truly “poor people” (to use your words) typically don’t buy a lot of new cars in the first place. People on the lower end of the income scale are the main drivers of the used vehicle market.
Incentivizing EV purchases and infrastructure ultimately helps everyone. It will bring efficiencies to the supply chain, and will drive investment into resources that should help drive prices down. At the same time, within the next 5 years or so you should see growth in the used EV market, which as more stock becomes available and used EVs become more normalized should make them more economical to purchase (as they’re already more economical to run and maintain).
More new EVs now means more used EVs down the road, which will allow people to get into a better car for less money.
Isn’t there a big issue regarding the permanent wearing down of batteries though? Not sure anyone would want to buy a 10 y/o EV with a worn-to-hell battery that has a greatly diminished max range. And last I heard, new batteries are thousands of dollars, but maybe that’s changed?
Modern batteries last a lot better, and there’s a huge difference between an 80 mile EV that’s lost a third of its range and a 300 mile EV that’s lost a third of its range anyway.
Also, PHEV vehicles will retain most of the benefit of all-electric, while alleviating range anxiety stemming from deteriorated batteries
The batteries on modern EVs doesn’t wear anywhere near the rate that people think they do. A properly cared for battery (which doesn’t require much care other than keeping it charged properly) will easily last 15+ years — and likely beyond the lifetime of the car they were installed into. Manufacturers already offer 8+ year battery warranties on new EVs, because they know they can easily beat that (barring a manufacturing defect of some kind).
(In Japan, Nissan has been taking cells out of old Leafs that have at least 80% remaining capacity and are making them into home power packs. The Nissan Leaf was one of the first EVs and used an older battery chemistry — and even there, the batteries are typically outliving the cars they were originally installed into).
It’s a little difficult to say with certainty what the lifetime of an EV battery is going to be like right now, as EVs with modern chemistries aren’t yet 15 years old (they’re more like 5 to 7 years old at most). Anecdotally, those I know with EVs in that age range typically have less than 1% capacity loss (and ODB-II reader can typically check this for you, so it’s not difficult to determine).
Now of course it’s possible that someone has abused the hell out of their vehicle in ways that reduce the battery life (like routinely driving it to completely pull-over-to-the-side-of-the-road empty before recharging) — but as mentioned above an ODB-II reader will quickly show what the battery capacity is like. Hopefully used car sellers would check this themselves and provide it to buyers — but if not, ODB-II readers on Amazon aren’t terribly expensive to buy to check for oneself.
Battery wear concerns are going to be more for “classic” EV collectors in 30+ years time, and won’t be for your typical EV driver.
Where has this battery technology come from? It’s still lithium ION I well be surprised if it lasts 15 years unless they seriously over provisioned.
Batteries can be fixed, they’re made of cells and they don’t all die at once. You don’t have to replace the whole battery and there’s already shops who will refurb them. Hoovie on YouTube got hia Tesla S battery fixed for 2500 bucks.
Edit: Also, there’s secondary uses for cells. You can use EV battery cells in all kinds of applications from grid storage to RC cars. Again, there’s companies repurposing them already. You can buy second hand cells from a bunch of places.
A big reason for that programme was to try to take some of the most polluting vehicles off the road (either due to age or being in poor repair). There is no need for such a programme in a world of electric vehicles, so I doubt there would be any incentive for a government to run some a programme again.
