Did the "big bill" just end EV Tax Credits for Slates? [WARNING: NO POLITICS]

[sodamo]

Well, perhaps because whether directly or indirectly, fossil fuels subsidies affect everyone, acknowledged or not, even you.

 

[Karl Childers]

I just saw this part of the bill, buying a U.S. made vehicle. Might take away some of the sting if EV credits go away.

 

[Letas]

For those of us considering financing instead of paying cash for your new Slate, here is another incentive currently included in the big, beautiful bill...

"Provide deduction of up to $10,000 for loan interest on new vehicles that undergo final assembly in the U.S. For tax years 2025-2028."

So, if the bill passes and you take delivery in 2027, appears you can write off the interest on the loan for 2 years. That's not bad considering the first two years of an auto loan are heavily biased towards interest and very little is applied to the principal.

Assuming the ev credit no longer applies (a safe bet) and you finance the entire amount with tax ($30K) @ 7% the interest paid in the first 24 months is $3,280 that can be written off your taxes. Not too shabby.

Deduction, not credit.
More like a $900 savings.

$7500>$900

 

[metroshot]

No more EV tax credits effective today.
US made EVs only until Sept 30, 2025....

 

[E90400K]

Now that the crutch is gone, if the industry wants to sell EV, perhaps they'll develop a better battery at a lower cost.

 

[E90400K]

All that would be fine and well if fossil fuels themselves weren't so heavily subsidized . . . and that this legislation also didn't go after the domestic manufacturing of solar, batteries and the like with such a vengeance. It's all very stupid and short-sighted at this point.

I don't have an ideological purity test so refined that I would say we should never have subsidies in place to advance new technologies. A careful review of history will indicate we've done it with just about everything at one point or another, typically to the betterment of our lives and the establishment or reinvention of home-based manufacturing.

Government isn't a business. It's a service. Subsidies are there to jump start new business ideas in the private sector and then are designed to fade or "get out of the way" eventually. The original 2007 to 2022 EV tax credit capped 200,000 units per manufacturer. What it ended up doing, unfortunately, was to penalize manufacturers who were early to the market with their EVs and sold a lot, because they were better cars than what the other guy was making. So, yes, subsidies can hurt business if they were designed poorly from the start or can't be revised along the way.

Biden era EV subsidies (Build Back Better through the Inflation Reduction Act) set a timeline for these subsides to fade out for all manufacturers by 2030. That was a better plan than the old one. At first, there were also provision for union manufacturing. Elon, of course, hated that, because Tesla is famously non-union. So those got dropped. There were always provisions for more domestic manufacturing over importing. I don't think that was a bad thing, since it encouraged new investment and new hiring on these shores. That's what ended up getting passed in late 2022. I think it was something good for both the industry and the consumer, while keeping us competitive with the rest of the world. With some tweeking here and there over the upcoming years, it should have simply been allowed to run its course and expired on time in 2030.

So, yes, I'll ask again . . . after more than a century of doing so, why are we still subsidizing the fossil fuel industry? Where's your outrage there? If a gasoline car was still cheaper to buy (compared to an EV) but the fuel was not just twice as expensive but, instead, 4 TIMES AS EXPENSIVE as comparable units of electricity, what do you think would happen to the gasoline vehicle market at that point?

The sunset date was 2032. But by then 15-minute 1,000-mile sodium-solid-state batteries costing $28/kWh were going to be prevalent (sarcasm).