B.C. is now on a 10-year countdown to hit the province’s mandate for all new, light-duty vehicle sales to be zero-emission by 2035.
Ross Ferguson’s job on the lot at Key West Ford in New Westminster is to place the thought in a potential car buyer’s mind that an electric vehicle really would fit what they need.
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“Most people just want to stick with what they know,” said Ferguson, operations adviser and EV specialist at the dealership.
If he can break through that barrier, the practicalities of an EV — no $150 oil changes twice a year, no more replacing spark plugs or air filters, cheap electricity versus expensive gasoline to fill up a pickup’s gas tank — sell themselves.
“When you tally up that savings over someone’s typical four-year lease or seven-year car loan, suddenly, even without the incentives, the EV saves you an absolute fortune,” Ferguson said.
Bridging that divide is increasingly important now that the auto market has mostly absorbed the EV early adopters. And B.C. is now on a 10-year countdown to hit the province’s mandate for all new, light-duty vehicle sales to be zero-emission by 2035.
One of those incentives, however, a federal rebate under the zero-emission vehicles program, evaporated as of Jan. 13. The government suspended the program, which paid out rebates of up to $5,000, as it ran out of funds.
The decision to terminate the EV incentives came without warning, Ferguson said: “It’s really made things a lot more difficult for people who were thinking about making the switch.”
Manufacturers, including Ford and Honda in Canada, stepped in — at least temporarily — to offer discounts equivalent to the federal incentive program.
The province has claimed success in moving toward its 2035 goals, with zero-emission vehicles accounting for 25 per cent of all new sales after the first nine months of 2024, the latest figures available, according to Energy Minister Adrian Dix’s office.
Disappearance of the federal rebate, however, isn’t the only potential bump in the road toward zero-emission adoption.
Asked if B.C. planned to maintain its existing rebates, Dix only said by email that B.C. will be “re-evaluating our (rebate) program” with a view to “sustainability and affordability.”
Further uncertainty arises from U.S. President Donald Trump’s steps to revoke the previous administration’s symbolic goal to hit 50-per-cent zero emission vehicle sales nationally by 2030. He also signed orders that started to withdraw support for EV charging infrastructure and said he would consider ending EV tax credits.
And, of course, there remains the looming tariff threat from the U.S. Canada has said its proposed retaliatory tariffs on a variety of U.S.-made goods could include electric vehicles.
In Canada, zero-emission vehicle advocates worry incentives are being pulled too soon.
The 2025 target might still be possible, said Ron Burton, spokesman for the Vancouver Electric Vehicle Association. “With the (zero-emission vehicle) mandates, the odds are very much in our favour. The rebates just kept things moving along.”
Rebates help to narrow the price margin on EV versions of ordinary automobiles that wind up with luxury-car price tags.
“You’re not going to have that same growth in sales that you had when almost everybody could get in,” Burton said.
B.C.’s auto dealers worry that they’ve already started to witness this, particularly after the province reduced the maximum price threshold for its rebates on light-duty vehicles to $50,000 from $55,000. The Go Electric program offers rebates of $500 to $4,000 based on income and whether the buyer is purchasing a plug-in hybrid or EV.
Blair Qualey, CEO of the New Car Dealers Association, said the price threshold change pushed 75 per cent of available EV models out of rebate eligibility.
“In 2024, we began to see an overall softening in the market,” with rebate applications dropping to 19,069 from 27,050 in 2023, Qualey said. “Early adopters of (zero-emission vehicles) have made their market choice, but a large segment of consumers will need to overcome key factors, including price, range anxiety, access to convenient and reliable charging infrastructure.”
In addition to restoring EV incentives to pre-COVID-19 levels, Qualey’s association is asking the province to revisit what he described as the “punitive policies” of the zero-emission vehicle mandate. Qualey said some manufacturers are talking about reducing the allocation of all vehicles to B.C. in 2025 in order to meet the arbitrary mandate quotas.
Dix said by email that drivers can still get rebates through the Go Electric program. However, he added that the rebate program “operates within available resources and we continually assess how best to support B.C.’s climate goals and transportation needs.”
Dix also said the province will continue “prioritizing investment in EV infrastructure,” such as rebates for home and workplace charging programs, and building out the network of public fast-charging stations. Limits on the availability of public charging was the No. 1 gripe of EV owners, according to a recent poll by the B.C. Automobile Association.
“(That) other piece of it is that seven out of 10 (polled people) are saying that a lack of reliable and convenient public charging is their biggest problem,” said Shawn Pettipas, a director at the member-based BCAA.
There is a long game to consider in EV battery technology becoming less expensive, which should make subsidies less important, according to clean-energy economist Werner Antweiler.
Rebate programs were only intended to kickstart EV sales until economies of scale in manufacturing made EVs comparable with ICE vehicles.
Otherwise, B.C. would be subsidizing every single vehicle, once they were all EVS, by $8,000 or $9,000, said Antweiler, an associate professor in the University of B.C.’s Sauder School of Business. “That’s just impossible.”
Antweiler said B.C.’s quotas for sales, if the province maintains them, are more important because they shift the burden for adoption away from expensive incentives — but only if EVs become cheaper.
“The Holy Grail of EV adoption is the EV that is cheaper than a comparable internal combustion vehicle,” Antweiler said.
On that front, Antweiler said manufacturers have been making advances with new materials, such as iron phosphate, a cheaper alternative to nickel manganese cobalt in making lithium ion batteries.
“They have been scaling up massively (in China) and have brought down the cost simply from scale,” Antweiler said. “And we see this taking place worldwide as well, so we can fully expect the cost of batteries will continue to decline.”
Before the end of the decade we “definitely will have reached cost parity,” Antweiler said.
EV owners who drive a lot have probably already recovered the purchase price of their vehicles “on a life cycle basis” from the savings of not having to buy gasoline or pay as much for maintenance, even if the vehicles were more expensive to buy, Antweiler said.
Antweiler pointed to the example of Norway, where almost 90 per cent of new car sales in 2024 were EVs as evidence that “we can get there, technically speaking. I have no doubt.”
“Fiscally, we have to do it without subsidies, we need the mandate,” Antweiler added.
When it comes to Trump’s steps to strip away supports for zero-emission vehicle adoption, other experts don’t believe that will put that big of a dent in U.S. manufacturing of those vehicles. North American automakers operate in a global market that is headed in a different direction, said Trevor Melanson, a spokesman for Clean Energy Canada.
“If we live in this little fossil fuel island for awhile, or whatever, Chinese companies basically just take over the global market,” Melanson said. “They want to sell those (EV) vehicles.”
Jonn Axsen, a professor at Simon Fraser University’s school of resource and environmental management, said the lack of a federal zero-emission vehicle mandate isn’t all that important as long as states such as California maintain their standards.
“California has always been pretty useful as the leader (with) a track record of strong environmental regulation for decades,” Axsen said.