Government asked to take stronger EV stance

Our government should show leadership to accelerate the uptake of EVs following Britain’s announced ban on diesel and petrol cars and vans by 2040.

So says Flip the Fleet co-founder Henrik Moller in a Newstalk ZB interview with Nadine Higgins.

“One of the problems is that as other countries start to ditch their conventional vehicles New Zealand could become a dumping ground for them,” Moller says. We run on cheap imports of vehicles.”

He says France is also banning diesel and petrol cars from 2040, the Netherlands will switch over by 2030, and Norway will change by 2025.

“So this is just one of a gathering number of signs that the end of the internal combustion vehicle’s dominance in the transport area is coming.”

However, our government won’t follow the UK and France’s lead in banning new petrol and diesel cars from 2040, opting instead to incentivise the switch to electric vehicles, transport minister Simon Bridges says.

He says the government is for “encouraging growth using a range of incentives to grow demand,” reports the NZ Herald.

One is EV owners’ exemption from paying road user charges, saving them around $600 a year.

Bridges says EVs are the future and a move from petrol and diesel to low-emission transport is “a natural evolution”.