Electic car (new) in Italy for 3000€ only. State pays 85%: is it sane?

Yes, the intensives handed out are a bit out of hand. Specially if you can stack them. You can literally buy EV in New Jersey and resell while making a profit from stack.

Its pretty clear that there is very little overall strategy, its just a bunch of politicians doing one thing or another depending on the situation. And it happens on all levels. And its mostly about retoric and what you can sell, not a smart strategy.

The government could do much better things for the environment and spend the money much better for the EV revolution. Making gas more expensive but specially making new gas car more expensive. Doing large scale investment and financing in local and green EV supply chain. Helping to set up a EV charging network (depends on how the nation organizes streets and highways).

Also I think helping people buy cheaper EV makes much more sense. Rich people shouldn't get help buying Model S or Porsche. And that number should go down over time, 5-10 years ago intensives for an expensive car, to support the technology.

I think a lot of it has gotten out of hand (here in the US). Tax credits for tons of different things. Complicated tax planning and filing. Some of the things don't make sense (except for special interests) or are counter productive. So you want people to save the environment so you help them buy an electric car, yet you provide incentives to have more children which will increase consumption (which our economy is built on) and lead to more environmental impact...

The masses want more and more without paying for it themselves. It's convenient to have someone else pay for it rather than discuss the underlying issue that the policy is (poorly) addressing.

of course it’s insane, there’s nothing environmental about a thousand pound battery, it is a subsidy to corporations, sing me a new one

Destroying a perfectly usable thing is insanely anti-environmental [1]. The rule is: reduce, reuse, recycle and not: just destroy it and make a new one…

[1] Even if the car was emitting co2, there’s still people buying ice cars - and now, the factories have to make an additional ice car because we scrapped a perfectly servicable one.

If the car junking is anything like the Cash for Clunkers program it's probably a big waste of money, see https://fee.org/articles/cash-for-clunkers-was-a-complete-fa...

To be honest, that is I think what is going wrong in the EU. Italy is kind of doing it right, since taking credits will not really affect it's own credit ranking. Under such conditions (lets say zero sum game between states) the best strategy is to spend as much money as possible.

Loss leader to try to prime the market and justify massive grid spending to support pre permissioned, ultimately remotely controlled/driven BEV travel imo

What model car did they buy?

How long did they have to keep the used car that was destroyed?

hacking compute

It _was_ alot of money, but maybe not anymore. That is the effect of all this government largess. The value of a certain sum of money is dropping.

It’s a problem with social systems/big governments/EU in general and I see it happening all the time: take from one person and give to another, without meaningful justification.

Sometimes even the state defaults and other states have to bail it out (eg, German taxpayers pay for Italian cars).

Of course some degree of government involvement is required to address externalities. But this seems mindless spending without a discused plan.