Italy has big plan to put one million e-cars on roads

MILAN: The populist government in Italy, Europe’s most sluggish market for electric cars, has a bigbang plan to put one million of the vehicles on the nation’s roads. Getting anywhere near that target could cost the state US$10bil in incentives.

As coalition partners the League and the Five Star Movement haggled last month over their contract to govern, Five Star managed to insert a passage on “reductions in gasoline and diesel vehicles.” The document goes on to call for “incentives to support the acquisition of electric and hybrid vehicles” – a cash-for-clunkers program.

While the contract doesn’t set numeric targets, Five Star’s 31 year-old leader Luigi Di Maio, whose dual posts as labour and development minister and deputy premier are his first paid jobs in government, is on record with an ambitious, some say unrealistic, goal of one million battery-powered cars by 2022. That would make Italy Europe’s leader in electric cars.

If the one million-car target has a flashy, campaign-style ring to it, that’s because Di Maio unveiled it at a campaign stop last year, as he toured Sicily in an electric Nissan. The number, far more aggressive than auto analyst forecasts, eventually made it into the national platform of Five Star, an Internet-based, anti-establishment party founded less than 10 years ago that was the biggest vote-getter in the March 4 national elections.

A spokesman confirmed that the Italian government is working toward the target, and declined to comment on the cost.