Croatian subsidies are among the most generous in Europe.
The Fund for Environment Protection and Energy Efficiency has announced (before the new acting director took over) that this year it would again co-finance procurement of electric and hybrid cars with 25 million kuna. However, the budget for the Fund has not been adopted as of yet, and therefore competitions for the subsidies have not yet been published, and in the meantime the public is asking if the state is simply shovelling the money in the direction of the wealthy with these subsidies for the electric cars, reports energetika-net.com on May 22, 2016.
Croatia has been disbursing subsidies for three years now, and they are among the most generous in Europe. While Croatia gives about 10,000 euros in subsidies for foreign-made electric cars, Germany, a much richer country, is starting with this practice just now and will allocate just 4,000 euros per car for this purpose.
As for hybrid cars, Croatia allocates 30,000 to 50,000 kuna per car, while Germany has decided to support such purchases with 3,000 euros. And what is more, the incentives will not be given by the German state only; half of the money will come from their local car industry, the same industry that makes profit on our car market from our subsidies for e-mobility.
E-mobility is supposed to be a part of a wider concept involving clean transportation, but in Croatia this is not the case. On the other hand, Germans have decided that without detailed cost-benefit analysis they will not give one euro from the budget, so they have not been in a rush to invest the taxpayers’ money in e-mobility. The state gets involved only when there are preconditions for an industry to advance using certain technology. They have tested this approach on renewable energy sources and now they are exporting this approach around the world.
There are almost 30 models of electric vehicles on the German market at this point and the offer keeps growing. Croatia is doing things differently – the state is following foreign trends without a serious analysis, it does not create any preconditions for industry development and is spending money like a drunken millionaire, while the industry and the citizens suffer the consequences.
