City EV dealer buzzing over electric car news
A Government scheme to get ‘‘gas guzzlers’’ off roads by helping more low-income families afford electric or hybrid vehicles is ‘‘fantastic news’’, says Nick Down of Hamilton EV.
He was commenting after just under $580 million, over time, was revealed yesterday for increasing electric and hybrid vehicle use as part of the Government’s climate change Emissions Reduction Plan.
But a senior regional councillor has reservations about the plan and cautions against getting too fixated on swapping fuel-run vehicles for electric, saying expanding public transport is crucial for curbing emissions.
Down, managing director of Hamilton’s only specialist EV dealer, agreed there was not a lot of fine detail yet about how the scheme would work. ‘‘They’re still fine-tuning it.’’
But overall the announcement was very positive. ‘‘I think that’s fantastic news. I’ve been working with them [the Government] for months,’’ referring to advice he provided to Parliament’s transport select committee.
Down felt the targeting of lowincome families was particularly important.
‘‘The concept behind the scheme is not to incentivise someone who can buy an $80,000 Tesla. We wanted to help lowincome families.’’
His firm was strongly supportive of measures to boost the electric and hybrid fleets, Down said.
‘‘Get those gas-guzzling vehicles off the road.’’
Down said the firm was also pleased at how the announcement could boost its sales.
Incentives and expanded vehicle charger networks were essential to helping spread use of such vehicles.
‘‘We’ve got that happening in the New Zealand market now. And this announcement will help that even further.’’
While she liked support for more electric vehicle ownership, Waikato Regional Council climate action committee chairperson Jennifer Nickel said it was important not to get too focused on swapping like-for-like with fuel-run cars, and she wanted far more public transport use to reduce emissions.
Noting the Government plan’s promotion of climate action being linked to cutting the cost of living, Nickel also said more public transport helped eliminate the need for private cars and associated costs.
She also liked other aspects of the plan, including more bus drivers and research to cut agricultural emissions.
However, the scale of the global warming problem, and the urgency needed to deal with it, ‘‘just shows we need a lot more people on this stuff full-time’’, Nickel said.
The plan was moving in the right direction but ‘‘it’s still just too slow’’.
The latest international advice was that the world needed to act far quicker to curb emissions, Nickel said.
Hamilton mayor Paula Southgate agreed greater electrification of society was important in reducing emissions.
Some may be worried the Government was acting too quickly, some that it was too slow, but the city council was committed to ‘‘upping our game on climate’’ anyway.
Good plans were in place to do this. ‘‘We’ve now got to start doing something.’’ The council would also check that what it planned was consistent with Government expectations.
Southgate said moving towards net zero carbon emissions by 2050 would be one of local government’s biggest challenges.
Tim Mackle, chief executive of Hamilton-headquartered agriculture heavyweight DairyNZ, strongly welcomed an announcement of $339 million over four years to research ways of cutting agriculture sector emissions.
For Waikato, this was particularly important for curbing methane emissions from cows, given the region’s huge dairy sector.
A multi-sector He Waka Eke Noa plan for how agricultural emissions could be levied is due to be finished at the end of the month. A central idea is that levies would help pay for research, meaning the funding announced by the Government yesterday would complement levy-funded research efforts, Mackle said.
A Waikato University specialist on emissions, senior lecturer in chemical and process engineering Martin Atkins, said an important part of the announcement was a goal of 50% of national ‘‘total final energy’’ use being from renewable sources, such as hydro-electricity and biomass, by 2035.