Italy fails at electric cars

Norway has one of the world’s most interesting car markets today. Tesla regularly tops the sales charts in the Scandinavian nation, selling a tenth of its global production there, and the Nissan LEAF also stars in a land that heavily favours electric cars even as it benefits from North Sea oil and gas.

Further south in Italy, electric cars have yet to find traction despite plenty of incentives, and the country’s peak dealer association insists the government has its incentive scheme completely wrong.

Where Norwegian electric-car buyers forgo sales and value-added taxes (and get free passes for parking and toll roads), the Italian incentive scheme left almost €35 million ($A52m) on the table last year.

The two-tier Italian scheme, which offers private buyers a rebate of up to €5000 ($A7500) on new electric cars, flopped in 2013 according to Federauto.

It explained that there was a cash incentive pool of just €5 million ($A7.5m) for private buyers, with the government funding 20 per cent of the purchase price of cars emitting fewer than 50g/km of CO2, capped at €5000 ($A7500).

However, the rules for corporate buyers were so unwieldy that most ignored it and continued buying conventionally powered cars.

“It’s like using a drop of water to douse a fire,” Federauto said in a statement this week.

What makes qualifying for an EV incentive so difficult for businesses like corporations and rental and taxi companies is that they first need to scrap a car that’s at least 10 years old.

“The funding for private buyers was used up in a matter of hours and the €35 million set aside for corporate customers was left virtually untouched,” Federauto President Filippo Pavan Bernacchi said.

“In essence, we have thrown away public money without making the market any bigger.”

As a result of the failure of the corporate scheme in 2013, the Italian government has added another €31.3 million ($A46.7m) to it this year, taking the corporate pool up to €63.4 million ($A94.6m) according to the ministerial website.

For all that, Italians bought only 148 electric cars in March, headed by the Nissan LEAF with 54 converts, the Renault ZOE with 42 and the BMW i3 with 26. If that seems like it’s not too bad, Nissan only sold another 25 LEAFs in January and February, while Renault only found another 15 ZOE buyers.

By contrast, in the first quarter of this year Norwegians snapped up 2056 Tesla Model Ss, 1559 LEAFs, 719 examples of the VW e-up! and 646 BMW i3s.