> The problem is that large swathes of the population are outside of that and you're making their lives miserable by punishing ICE car ownership
I think that's the plan - force adoption and double down on the misery so that people forcefully invest into building infrastructure that otherwise wouldn't have.
In other words, you're synthesizing demand. It would be extremely interesting to see how it works out! In my limited experience, these synthetic initiatives explode in costs because it lets grifters, scammers and arbitragers defraud the synthetic demand side (due to the lack of a real free market system which is naturally self calibrating and managing).
One thing that I wonder about - unlike in the U.S. where gas is cheap, my understanding is that it's around $10/gal around most of the E.U. right now? If so, what's stopping people from running towards EVs naturally?
- Is it just the lack of charging infrastructure?
- Is it because most people in the E.U. live in dense areas where it's hard to setup charging infrastructure?
- Is it because most people in the E.U. live in dense areas where public transportation is cheap on a unit "per head" basis making local governments hesitate to invest in charging infrastructure directly?
- Is it that over-regulation in the E.U. make it extremely difficult to build charging infrastructure in the first place?
From a U.S. perspective, I would imagine that most of the U.S. (especially rural and suburban US) would switch to EVs overnight if Chinese EVs were allowed to flood the market. A lot of cities in the U.S. are accommodating literally golf carts on their streets so a $10k brand new Chinese EV that you could plugin is likely to sell like hotcakes.
