Presentation: "California Plug-In Hybrid Electric Vehicle Consumers Who Found the U.S. Federal Tax Credit Extremely Important in Enabling Their Purchase"

This presentation was given at the Behavior, Energy and Climate Change 2021 Conference.

Dr. Brett Williams, Senior Principal Advisor for Electric Vehicle Programs, presented findings based upon the open-source EVS-33 paper focused on PHEVs.

Key takeaways:

• Identifies and rank-orders characteristics of consumers most highly enabled by the federal tax credit (FTC) to adopt an EV, informing outreach and incentive design.
• The importance of the FTC was found to be increasing over time, providing evidence that it was too early to start phasing out the FTC.
• FTC influence was found to decrease for those with particularly low income, indicating that the benefit should not depend on tax liability.
• FTC influence increases for lower-priced EVs, indicating the benefit could be made more cost-effective if limited for luxury vehicles and/or increased for non-luxury vehicles.
• Evidence also supports keeping the FTC incentive amount large and bringing it closer to the point of sale.