By Kyle Stock | Bloomberg
Colorado drivers bought 9,446 electric vehicles in the most recent quarter, but Carrie Atiyeh is particularly psyched about 45 of them.
Atiyeh, associate director of transportation fuels and technology at the Colorado Energy Office, is one of the architects of the state’s Vehicle Exchange Program, which hands out a rebate of up to $6,000 to anyone who buys a new EV while surrendering a combustion-engine car. The program, which launched in late August, saw 45 people cash in a clunker by the end of September.
Scrappage policies like Colorado’s are gaining traction in the US as a two-for-one carbon bargain, a tidy way to catalyze clean car purchases while canceling out some of the least efficient machines. Vermont authorized a scrappage program in 2021; California did in 2014. In all three states, policymakers have mobilized around a simple calculation: If governments are going to dole out money to boost EV adoption, why not tie it to getting rid of gas guzzlers?
“It’s a really cool kind of holistic approach to getting these high-emission vehicles off the road,” Atiyeh says.
The timing of such programs is propitious, as high prices hamstring widespread EV adoption. The US also has more vehicles to scrap than ever. Between 2011 and 2021, the number of registered vehicles in the country surged to 282 million, an increase of almost 12%. Over the same time period, licensed drivers rose 10%.
Part of that disconnect is simple: Americans like buying new cars, particularly when there’s a strong economy and one of the strongest labor markets in history. Almost 28 million US households now own three or more vehicles, a 16% increase from five years ago.
But the long tail of US auto ownership is also extending. Over the past 10 years, the average age of a car on the road rose 9% to 12.2 years. For every silent new Tesla getting tucked into a garage, there’s a wheezing Ford Explorer rolling off the used car lot, or a geriatric Hummer…
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