A subsidy on used sales is tricky, since then you'd just be subsidizing changes of ownership. Unless the seller pays back the subsidy when they sell, you'd hav

A subsidy on used sales is tricky, since then you'd just be subsidizing changes of ownership. Unless the seller pays back the subsidy when they sell, you'd have a situation where the optimal strategy is just to trade a car back and forth between two owners a hundred times. I suppose you could make the subsidy only be claimable once per tax-payer, but still the incentive would be to buy an EV and then sell it right away just to get the credit. There are probably workarounds to that too, but it's hard to craft the rules in a way that doesn't create perverse incentives. I think one good way to increase the number of EVs on the road would be to subsidize EV conversions. Converting a gas car to electric is generally expensive, labor intensive, and requires a lot of custom fabrication. If we had an EV conversion subsidy, it might encourage companies to start making low-cost well-engineered kits that are relatively straightforward for a mechanic to install.