Do Electric Vehicle Subsidies Work?

Governments in Canada have been begging us to purchase EVs and plug-in hybrids for years. The carrot has been $600 million annually in federal subsidies (and more at the provincial level) aimed at consumers. The stick is the dark threat of outlawing internal combustion engines altogether. A third approach involves splashing billions of dollars of handouts and tax credits in the general direction of companies with starry-eyed plans to manufacture EV components locally.

I’m not going to discuss whether EVs are actually the best solution for whatever ails the environment. That may be a few levels above my pay grade. Instead, I’d like to analyze whether the consumer-focused subsidies actually worked.

To do that I first identified the provinces that offered subsidies for “battery electric vehicles” (i.e., EVs). Those would be British Columbia, Quebec, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia, and Newfoundland. That’ll give us a nice reference point for comparison against provinces that don’t offer subsidies. Specifically, those are Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and Ontario. (Although Manitoba did just introduce a rebate program in July of 2024.)

Of course, there are also federal subsidies available across the country.

Now there is one problem with the Statistics Canada sales data. Due to some weird licensing issue, there’s no sales data at all for Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, or Alberta. We’ll just have to do our best with what we’ve got.

Here are the numbers expressed as sales per 100,000 people (based on 2024 provincial population estimates):

The obvious big mover here is Quebec. Their Roulez Vert program – at $7,000 – is the most generous in the country (although it’s currently set to be phased-out by 2027). But Roulez Vert has been around since 2012, so it might not completely explain those huge jumps since 2022.

If you squint really hard at the graph, you should notice a modest jump in Ontario EV sales back in 2018. That would probably be due to last-minute bargain hunters reacting to the Ford government’s plans to cancel Ontario’s rebate.

But none of that is going to give us the precision we need to answer our real question: did government subsidies actually drive more EV sales? For that, we’ll need a bit of statistical analysis. This scatter plot visualizes the relationships between subsidies and average sales over time:

If our only data point was Quebec – with its impressive sales and high subsidy level – then the conclusion would be straightforward. But that’s exactly why we look for more data. So, for instance, BC has sales that, proportionally, were close to Quebec’s but with rebates that were 40 percent lower. And Canada’s federal rebates played a role in relatively few overall sales.

For those of you who enjoy such things, here are the actual numbers SciPy’s linear regression gave me:

Slope: 0.005910745672259122
Intercept: 13.256019105900187
R-squared: 0.31881294222441453
P-value: 0.14480378835260208
Standard Error: 0.00352721449117312

The slope indicates that for every additional thousand dollars of subsidy, EV sales would increase by only around six vehicles per 100,000 people. That’s compared with the intercept (13.26) which estimates the baseline (no-subsidy) sales at 13.26 units per 100,000 people.

The R-squared value suggests that about 32 percent of the variability in EV sales per 100,000 people is explained by the subsidy amount. But the P-value strongly suggests that the relationship is not statistically significant.

Meaning, in other words, that there’s no clear cause-and-effect relationship between the billions of dollars of government handouts and real-world vehicle sales. It’s distinctly possible that just as many EVs would have been purchased had there been no subsidies.

Related Topics:#DavidClinton #EVSubsidies DoEVSubsidiesWork ElectricVehicleSubsidies TheAudit

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Nissan, Honda scrap $60B merger talks amid growing tensions

Published on February 6, 2025

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MxM News

Quick Hit:

Nissan is reportedly abandoning merger talks with Honda, scrapping a $60 billion deal that would have created the world’s third-largest automaker. The collapse raises questions about Nissan’s turnaround strategy as it faces challenges from electric vehicle competitors and potential U.S. tariffs.

Key Details:

Nissan shares dropped over 4% following the news, while Honda’s stock surged more than 8%, signaling investor relief.
Honda reportedly proposed making Nissan a subsidiary, a move Nissan rejected as it was initially framed as a merger of equals.
Nissan is struggling with financial challenges and the transition to EVs, still reeling from the 2018 scandal involving former chairman Carlos Ghosn.

Diving Deeper:

Merger talks between Nissan and Honda have collapsed, according to sources, after months of negotiations to form an auto giant capable of competing with Chinese EV makers like BYD. The proposed deal, valued at over $60 billion, would have created the world’s third-largest automaker. However, differences in strategy and control ultimately derailed the discussions.

Reports indicate that Honda, Japan’s second-largest automaker, wanted Nissan to become a subsidiary rather than an equal merger partner. Nissan balked at the idea, leading to the collapse of negotiations. Honda’s market valuation of approximately $51.9 billion dwarfs Nissan’s, which may have fueled concerns about control. The failure of talks sent Nissan’s stock tumbling more than 4% in Tokyo, while Honda’s shares rose over 8%, reflecting investor confidence in Honda’s independent strategy.

Nissan, already in the midst of a turnaround plan involving 9,000 job cuts and a 20% reduction in global capacity, now faces mounting pressure to restructure on its own. Analysts warn that the failed merger raises uncertainty about Nissan’s ability to compete in an industry rapidly shifting toward EVs. “Investors may get concerned about Nissan’s future [and] turnaround,” Morningstar analyst Vincent Sun said.

Complicating matters further, Nissan faces heightened risks from U.S. tariffs under President Donald Trump’s trade policies. Potential tariffs on vehicles manufactured in Mexico could hit Nissan harder than competitors like Honda and Toyota. The stalled deal also impacts Nissan’s existing alliance with Renault, which had expressed openness to the merger. Renault holds a 36% stake in Nissan, including 18.7% through a French trust.

While both Nissan and Honda have stated they will finalize a direction by mid-February, the collapse of this deal signals deep divisions in Japan’s auto industry. With Nissan’s financial struggles and the growing dominance of Chinese EV makers, the company must now navigate an increasingly challenging market without external support.

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Trudeau must repeal the EV mandate

Published on January 25, 2025

Todayville

By Dan McTeague

Last Monday, Transport Canada released a bombshell statement, announcing that the Trudeau government’s program granting a $5,000 rebate to Canadians purchasing an Electric Vehicle (EV) had run out of money and would be discontinued, “effective immediately.” This followed a prior announcement from the government of Quebec that they would be suspending their own subsidy, which had amounted to $7,000 per EV purchased.

This is, of course, a game changer for an industry which the Trudeau government (as well as the Ford government in Ontario) has invested billions of taxpayer dollars in. That’s because, no matter the country, the EV industry is utterly dependent upon a system of carrots and sticks from the government, in the form of subsidies and mandates.

EVs have remained notably more expensive than traditional Internal Combustion Engine (ICE) vehicles, even with those government incentive programs. Without them the purchase of EVs becomes impossible for all but the wealthiest Canadians.

Which is fine. Let the rich people have their toys, if they want them. Though if they justify the expense by saying that they’re saving the planet by it, I may be tempted to deflate them a bit by pointing out that EVs are in no way appreciably better for the environment than ICE vehicles, how all the lithium, nickel, cobalt, manganese, aluminum, copper, etc, contained in just one single EV battery requires displacing about 500,000 lbs of earth. Mining these materials often takes place in poorer countries with substandard environmental regulations.

Moreover, the weight of those batteries means that EVs burn through tires more quickly than gas-and-diesel driven vehicles, and wear down roads faster as well, which among other issues leads to an increase in particulate matter in the air, what in the old days we referred to as “pollution.”

That is a potential issue, but one that is mitigated by the fact that EVs make up a small minority of cars on the road. Regular people have proved unwilling to drive them, and that will be even more true now that the consumer subsidies have disappeared.

Of course, it will be an issue if the Trudeau Liberals get their way. You see, Electric Vehicles are one of the main arenas in their ongoing battle with reality. And so even with the end of their consumer subsidies, they remain committed to their mandates requiring every new vehicle purchased in Canada to be electric by 2035, now just a decade away!

They’ve done away with the carrots, and they’re hoping to keep this plan moving with sticks alone.

This is, in a word, madness.

As I’ve said before, the Electric Vehicle mandate is a terrible policy, and one which should be repealed immediately. Canada is about the worst place to attempt this particular experiment with social engineering. It is famously cold, and EVs are famously bad in the cold, charging much slower in frigid temperatures and struggling to hold a charge. Which itself is a major issue, because our country is also enormous and spread out, meaning that most Canadians have to do a great deal of driving to get from “Point A” to “Point B.”

Canada is sorely lacking in the infrastructure which would be required to keep EVs on the road. We currently have less than 30,000 public charging stations nationwide, which is more than 400,000 short of Natural Resources Canada’s projection of what we will need to support the mandated total EV transition.

Our electrical grid is already stressed, without the addition of tens of millions of battery powered vehicles being plugged in every night over a very short time. And of course, irony of ironies, this transition is supposed to take place while our activist government is pushing us on to less reliable energy sources, like wind and solar!

Plus, as I’ve pointed out before, the economic case for EVs, such as it was, has been completely upended by the recent U.S. election. Donald Trump’s victory means that our neighbors to the south are in no immediate danger of being forced to ditch gas-and-diesel driven cars. Consequently, the pitch by the Trudeau and Ford governments that Canada was putting itself at the center of an evolving auto market has fallen flat. In reality, they’ve shackled us to a corpse.

So on behalf of my fellow Canadians I say, “Thank you,” to the government for no longer burning our tax dollars on this particular subsidy. But that isn’t even half the battle. It must be followed through with an even bigger next step.

They must repeal the EV mandate.

Dan McTeague is President of Canadians for Affordable Energy.