Wow. There was a subsidy?
To take advantage of this “advantage, a person would have to be pretty well up in the ranks of the “haves” already, it is NOTHING for the “have-nots”.
If anyone SHOULD have an uncontrolable urge to own a full electric or hybrid automobile, they should buy it on their own dime, not look for artificial distortions to the market to make it “affordable”. Up to now, the all-electric or hybrid internal-combustion and electric drive trains are not economically feasible, as their cost of manufacture is MUCH higher than whatever evergy savings they may ever return over the life of the vehicle.
An automobile that burns one gallon of fuel every 15 miles or so, will consume some 6,700 gallons of fuel in 100,000 miles. At $4 per gallon, this is about some $27,000 fr fuel costs.
An automobile that burns one gallon of fuel for every 40 miles or so, uses some 2,500 gallons of fuel in 100,000 miles, and at $4 per gallon, this is some $10,000.
The difference, $17,000, for an automobile that cost some $20,000 less to begin with, still leaves a deficit of $3,000, which is what a person pays for the vanity of owning a car with “modern” technology.
There are other ways of making the internal-combustion engine more economical than it now is (higher compression ratio, turbo-charging smaller-displacement engines, modifying drive train to keep the engine operating within a very narrow RPM range, using extremely high-quality lubricants throughout, recycling heat energy that would otherwise be dissipated to drive accessories, among others) that will insure that internal combustion-powered cars will be with us perhaps many decades yet.
Maybe, some day, battery technology and/or fuel cell systems will be sufficiently economically feasible to compete without subsidy with existing and probably future technology of internal-combustion engines, but like fusion power, that remains off in the indefinite future.