It's not the world's greatest car but if there was a carbon tax then it's cheap and fully electric.
There is also an obvious market response if something like that was actually introduced. If burning carbon cost more, people would buy more fuel efficient cars. Then those cars enter the used market a few years later.
This is one of the reasons the only sensible carbon tax proposal is the one where all of the tax revenue is distributed back to the population. In the first year, there will be more demand for efficient cars than existing supply, so they'll cost more. People who drive a lot will buy them anyway, but can use the refund to offset the cost. People who don't drive as much would eat the cost of the carbon tax on a less efficient vehicle, which isn't so bad because they don't drive as much, and then gets offset by the refund until more efficient cars filter into the used market. When that happens the tax revenue goes down because people have more efficient cars, so the refund gets smaller, but by then people don't need it as much because they have the more efficient cars.
I don’t believe any of this at all. Is anyone aware of any place where this has worked? If we’ve got data, let’s go with the data.
If all we have is opinions, let’s go mine. Fortunately, we have data.
Take Australia for example.
1. We had a carbon tax, sort of, briefly, but no one wanted it, and still doesn’t.
2. Fuel for vehicles here, petrol and diesel, has become wildly expensive, but cars have become huge to gigantic. Approximately no one drives a small car, approximately everyone owns at least two 4x4 and or SUVs, and those that don’t tend to drive a turbo charged Skyline or Subaru or similar.
Everyone drives relatively new cars compared to, say, 30 years ago when half the population drove a rusty floor pan around, you were luck to have anything resembling an actual car hanging off it.
No one here gives a shit about climate change, except maybe our Australia Broadcasting Corporation, but approximately no one consumes any of their media, and even if ya do 97% of the time their performing their mandate of proportional representation by publishing media aimed at the LGTBQI+ fictious community 100% of the time.
To the point where electric vehicle sales here in Australia have fallen off a cliff, and one hundred down ten to one the current buffoons get voted out and replaced by a potato promoting nuclear.
> We had a carbon tax, sort of, briefly, but no one wanted it, and still doesn’t.
Australia briefly had something their politicians called a carbon tax, but it was really cap and trade, which is an entirely different system and is rubbish. In particular, you have to give ordinary people back the money the carbon tax collects or they'll rightfully hate it, which cap and trade does not.
And then, because the system they proposed was the miserable one, the opposition leader credibly threatened to repeal it (and then did), so hardly anyone bothered to try to save costs under a program they reasonably expected to quickly go away.
Actual carbon taxes have been implemented in parts of Europe and they do what they're expected to do.
> Fuel for vehicles here, petrol and diesel, has become wildly expensive, but cars have become huge to gigantic.
People used to say "buy a smaller car" as the way to save fuel, since that used to be about the only way to do it. Then carmakers learned you could design an SUV with the use of a wind tunnel instead of shaping it like a brick and then use a smaller displacement engine with a turbo, or a hybrid system, and then you get SUVs with better fuel economy than subcompacts got in the 90s.
Even the huge stonking V8s still get modern aerodynamics and get significantly better mileage than the old ones did.
> To the point where electric vehicle sales here in Australia have fallen off a cliff
Electric vehicles were never popular in Australia. Range is their Achilles heel and Australia is spread out. But then you do a plug-in hybrid that can operate as electric 90% of the time while completely solving the range issue.
It's really not. Australia is mostly uninhabited, with most people living in very few high density places.
The average commute distance in Australia is 16 kilometres; 90% of Australians live on the East Coast; 73% of Australian's commute less than 20 kilometres.[1]
Even Western Australian has people living outside of Perth, which, by the way, is the most remote centre of commerce in the world, has an average commute distance of 20.4 kilometres.[1]
The average Australian vehicle travels about 12,100 kilometres annually, that's all vehicles including freight vehicles.[2] The average household in Australia owns 1.8 cars[3], so very many Australian's would be well served by owning at least one purely electric vehicle, but don't.
You keep talking about data but then looking at the wrong data.
Average commute or distance traveled per year isn't the interesting number. If you're considering an electric car with a range of 300km, it doesn't matter if your average commute is 16km or 100km, what matters is, do you take trips in excess of 300km?
> The number of survey respondents who have taken a road trip increased to 91.9% in 2024 from 88.4% in the same survey in 2022
And if anything, fewer total miles traveled per year would make EVs less attractive there because of less in terms of fuel savings.
> Plug-in hybrids are mostly not a thing here.
Plug-in hybrids are relatively new because they're basically normal hybrids with bigger batteries, so the batteries had to get cheap and light enough to make that work, and they got faster adoption in countries like the US because of tax incentives that favor PHEVs over traditional HEVs. Meanwhile from your own link, 25% of new cars in Australia are some type of hybrid of BEV, compared to 19% in the US. Consistent with "they are buying more fuel efficient vehicles", it's just that those vehicles are turbocharged low displacement or hybrid SUVs.
It's possible that the difference in tax incentives is causing carmakers to allocate PHEVs to the countries providing incentives specifically for those given a finite amount of battery production capacity, but according to your own numbers PHEVs are a good fit for Australians. Average commute is well within their all-electric range but then you still have no trouble taking the occasional road trip.
I'm all for it. I owned a hybrid SUV for a bit, performance and fuel economy were quite pleasant. But I kinda need a van, and can't drive four cars simultaneously, and there aren't any hybrid vans available here.
There is also an obvious market response if something like that was actually introduced. If burning carbon cost more, people would buy more fuel efficient cars. Then those cars enter the used market a few years later.
This is one of the reasons the only sensible carbon tax proposal is the one where all of the tax revenue is distributed back to the population. In the first year, there will be more demand for efficient cars than existing supply, so they'll cost more. People who drive a lot will buy them anyway, but can use the refund to offset the cost. People who don't drive as much would eat the cost of the carbon tax on a less efficient vehicle, which isn't so bad because they don't drive as much, and then gets offset by the refund until more efficient cars filter into the used market. When that happens the tax revenue goes down because people have more efficient cars, so the refund gets smaller, but by then people don't need it as much because they have the more efficient cars.