Effect of incentives on the purchases of electric vehicles

CO2 emissions keeps increasing, hereby the transport sector plays an important role. The introduction of the electric vehicle (EV) is an important way to reduce emissions, to successfully introduce the EV into the market, different subsidies and tax benefits are given to consumers. This raises the question how effective these incentives are to increase the sales of EVs. For this a panel data is used, which contains 28 countries in Europe over a time period of 10 years. The main findings in this study is that subsidies have a negative effect on the purchases of EV and tax benefits have a positive effect on the sales of EV, however there could also be seen that charging points also effect the sales. In addition, the relationship between GDP and the car sales follows a U-shaped curve.