Analysis says electric vehicles sales not affected by incentives

Engineerblogger
Sept 29, 2011

A study by JATO Dynamics suggests government incentives are having little impact on the sales of electric vehicles.

According to JATO, demand for electric vehicles (EV) increased ten-fold to 5,220 across Europe in the first half of this year compared to the 500 registered in the same period last year.

Germany, where incentives amount to around €380 (£330) per vehicle, is the leading EV market with January–June registrations of around 1,000. Denmark has incentives which amount to some €20,600 over five years of ownership but registered fewer than 300 EVs in the same period.

Where incentives are similar — such as Spain and the UK at around €6,500 per vehicle — there is a wide gap between registrations. The UK registered 599 EVs and Spain 122.

Gareth Hession, JATO’s vice-president for research, said: ‘The discrepancies highlight the apparently low influence of price on purchase decisions across the region.

‘Given this, it’s reasonable to conclude that sales are more affected by other factors such as the degree of urban geography, market maturity and charging infrastructure than was previously thought.’

Other factors that JATO believes influences EV ownership are the rights to use bus lanes and free city centre parking, such as in Oslo, and exemption from congestion charges as in London.

Europe’s biggest EV markets in the first half of this year after Germany were France (950 units), Norway (850), the UK (600), Austria (350) and Denmark (280). Spain (120) and Italy (100) were at the bottom of the table.

In a statement Hession said the EV market is set for significant growth, adding: ‘As the market matures we might expect subsidies to exert greater influence as other considerations such as charging infrastructure are addressed.

‘As it stands today, even the large subsidies don’t address the majority of end user concerns around real world application, flexibility and fitness for purpose.

‘It will be critical for manufacturers to better understand the factors if they are to maximise customer engagement and sales growth.’

Source: The Engineer

Additional Information:

• Report: Incentives Fail to Stimulate European Electric Vehicle Sales

The Shrinkage Solution

Technology Review
Sept 14, 2011

In 1966, a Nobel Prize-winning biologist named Joshua Lederberg suggested, in an essay in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, that because human evolution could now be directed by scientific means, we ought to seriously consider what kinds of changes we might like to see. A year later, in a provocative—and bizarre—essay for the July 1967 issue of Technology Review, a pair of MIT civil-engineering professors named Robert Hansen and Myle Holley considered one such change: making people smaller.

We wish here to comment on one kind of human change—a change of physical size—which apparently would be far less difficult to achieve than the modifications we infer to be potentially feasible through genetic alchemy. Indeed, it is our understanding that controlled, substantial modification of size may require only the judicious application of findings in the area of endocrinology.

The authors never got into the specifics of how humans might be made smaller, or how much smaller they should be. They acknowledged that the idea would probably generate "widespread antagonism," but they argued that given our emerging capacity for genetic engineering, it would be reckless to ignore the possibilities altogether: "Can we afford not to consider, in all its aspects, the question of human size?"

If, as the authors believe, the question of human size merits thought, it appears more reasonable to consider a decrease rather than an increase in size. First, an increase in size would clearly aggravate the problems we already associate with our excessive rate of population growth. Second, the advantages of large size and physical strength (in the performance of useful labor, the resolution of individual and group conflicts, etc.) have been almost entirely eliminated by technology.

Smaller people, they wrote, would need less food and tinier houses. They'd create less waste. And the smaller you are, the bigger the world seems. "A reduction in man's size might be compared to an increase in the size of the earth," the authors noted.

Consider, as but one example, the relation of man's size to the facilities provided for his transportation. Smaller man could mean smaller vehicles, either smaller highway rights of way or greater capacity for existing highways, easier provision for off-street parking ... Similar benefits of smaller human size become apparent in buildings.

In a section called "What Price Man's Shrinkage?" they addressed the "problems of transition." For instance: How would people react emotionally to such a proposal? Would they be less able to endure cold weather? And at what rate should the shrinkage occur? Five percent per decade? Twenty-five percent?

Allowing for an inevitable transition period, will smaller man really be comfortable in lesser space (or volume) than his larger predecessors have come to expect? ... If a change in size appears desirable, what incentives, if any, will lead to its achievement through free, individual choice?

Strange as the argument sounds, it did resonate as late as 1995, when an essay in The Futurist briefly cited Hansen and ­Holley's work in TR before pointing out that pygmies are physically fine at four and a half feet tall. Hansen and Holley emphasized that they weren't necessarily advocating making people smaller—they were simply (as ­Lederberg advised) giving the idea the careful thought they believed it deserved.

Needless to say effective consideration of this question will require not only effort within the scientific and humanistic communities, but frank and sympathetic interactions between the two. The end product of such inquiry and debate is not predictable. Possible conclusions range from feasibility, desirability, and moral acceptability to impossibility for technical, social, or other reasons. But need we prejudge the issue? Or should we seriously study the question?