In an interesting twist, this Bloomberg article describes how e-rickshaws are becoming the norm in India, despite the lack of subsidies and totally independently of any government initiative: ‘India’s Rickshaw Revolution Leaves China in the Dust‘.
“The South Asian nation is home to about 1.5 million battery-powered, three-wheeled rickshaws – a fleet bigger than the total number of electric passenger cars sold in China since 2011. But while the world’s largest auto market dangled significant subsidies to encourage purchases of battery-powered cars, India’s e-movement hardly got a hand from the state.”
It is just that e-rickshaws are easier to maintain and operate and generally more lucrative than conventional petrol-powered machines. And this creates great benefits in terms of atmospheric pollution which can already be measured.
This just shows that even if governments can try to influence markets through subsidies, progress can come from other places, and that the market does not wait when a product just becomes better. The issue for widespread electric vehicle adoption is thus not to subsidize more, but to make the vehicle more practical and usable than petrol-powered vehicles. Vehicle producers, you are warned!
