Finland & France include e-bikes in scrapping schemes

Here is to a true transport turnaround as France and Finland get creative in their e-mobility incentives. France wants to offer owners of cars with combustion engines a special form of scrapping premium: 2,500 euros for the purchase of a pedelec.

The French National Assembly just cleared the way for the corresponding bill. It was an amendment to a draft climate bill in parliament that aims to reduce greenhouse emissions by 40% in 2030 from 1990 levels.

Reuters writes that if adopted, France would become the first country in the world to offer people the chance to trade in an old ICE for an electric or folding bicycle, the French Federation of Bicycle Users (FUB) said.

“For the first time, it is recognised that the solution is not to make cars greener, but simply to reduce their number,” Olivier Schneider of the FUB told the news agency.

Only it is not quite correct. In Finland, the scrapping bonus also includes an e-bike option and goes beyond that. Citizens handing in their old fossil-fuel burner may use the scrapping premium of 1,000 euros towards said pedelec or purchase an electric car or a ticket for public transport. The trend in Finland is clear: Of the 3,200 applicants so far, 2,000 went for electric bikes.

We remain curious to see what the French will do once the bill makes it through parliament in Paris. France had just extended the EV subsidy scheme earlier this year and included used electric vehicles. Buyers get a lump sum of 1,000 euros and may combine it with the “prime à la conversion,” which subsidizes the purchase of a new or used electric car or plug-in hybrid with up to 5,000 euros when scraping the old combustion engine. This conversion premium has been extended in its current form until mid-2021.

As reported in our newsletter using data by Avère, we saw French buyers opting for 30,712 electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles in March, representing a market share of 13.3%. This included 15,592 BEVS (+ 183% compared to March 2020), 975 commercial EVs (+ 131%) and 14,145 plug-in hybrids (+ 682%) that were newly registered in France last month.

twitter.com (data Finland), reuters.com (France)