Hybrid Cars

Hybrid cars are becoming increasingly popular. A hybrid car is one that uses two or more engines, an electric motor and conventional engine. The standard engine can either be petrol or diesel. During lower speeds, the electric engine powers the car while at high speeds the standard engine is at work. Hybrid cars use less fuel and emit fewer CO2 emissions.

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Although they are becoming more known, people are yet to start using them due to little knowledge about the cars. The government uses incentives, discounts in loans and insurance, to attract more sales. A lot of cities are switching their public transport to hybrid buses and cars to conserve the environment. However, hybrid cars have their disadvantages. This essay will discuss the disadvantages of tax incentives offered by the government on the hybrid vehicles.

Incentives on hybrid cars do not make them more economically friendly but make them more affordable to wealthy people. The government incentives do not make the cars as cheap for the ordinary taxpayers. The taxpayers still find the car quite expensive off. According to the Congressional Budget Office report, 2012, the incentives would be higher by $4500 to make the hybrid cars more affordable. However, the incentives still do not make the cars cheap. The taxpayers meanwhile are left with the burden to cover for the lost incentives (Zhang, 2014).

.The federal government has set standards for the average fuel economy for all cars a company can sell so that the company may not exceed the limit. This means that the more hybrid cars sold, the car companies can sell more low fuel economy cars without breaking the law. It allows for manufacturers to produce more low fuel economy vehicles. Therefore, this goes against incentives effect given by the government to conserving the environment (Diamond, 2009). Notably, hybrid vehicles have little or no impact on the total fuel use and greenhouse emissions. Moreover, incentives might take up to 30 years to pay.

On the other hand, hybrid cars are not good for the environment. The car is not the wrong but how it is manufactured destroys the environment. Hybrid production process requires a lot of materials and the process itself is complicated. The mining of the resources used to manufacture the cars, have adverse effects on water, air and the ecology. Moreover, transporting the minerals adds to the amount of CO2 emitted during shipping (Eppstein, 2011). Since hybrid manufacture is more complex than the regular cars, the factories produce more pollution and moreover require more energy for production. Thus, almost ten times pollution is produced. Therefore, hybrid cars are not as environmentally friendly as perceived.

In conclusion, hybrid vehicles are the new alternative according to governments regarding the reduction of greenhouse emissions during driving. However, giving tax incentives to the purchasers of the cars is not an effective method. The cars end up being expensive to the taxpayers and the government. Moreover, manufacturers take advantage of the incentives to sell cheap fuel economy cars that produce pollutant emissions to the environment. Thus, the fight for a clean environment is rendered useless. Production of the hybrid cars also emits a lot of CO2 into the air. The government is doing the right thing in encouraging the purchase of these cars, but they may not have the resources to continue with the tax credit in the future.

References

Diamond, D. (2009). The impact of government incentives for hybrid-electric vehicles: Evidence from US states. Energy Policy, 37(3), 972-983.

Eppstein, M. J., Grover, D. K., Marshall, J. S., & Rizzo, D. M. (2011). An agent-based model to study market penetration of plug-in hybrid electric vehicles. Energy Policy, 39(6), 3789-3802.

Zhang, X., Xie, J., Rao, R., & Liang, Y. (2014). Policy incentives for the adoption of electric vehicles across countries. Sustainability, 6(11), 8056-8078.