Toyota proposing tax incentives to promote market for hybrid vehicles

Ninnart said the carmaker would ask the government to cut taxes on hybrid vehicles (HVs), which are currently 20-30 per cent more expensive than conventional cars, which would help expand their market size to 100,000 units annually in five years, and reaching economy-of-scale production.

Promoting HVs would help the Thai automotive industry to reduce the impacts of corporate-average fuel-economy (CAFE) standards that a growing number of countries are imposing and which are expected to affect the volume of pickup trucks exported from Thailand, he said. 

Thailand is expected to produce 1.9 million motor vehicles this year, 62 per cent of which will be for export. Of the export total, 75 per cent are pickup trucks. 

Ninnart said that for Toyota alone, CAFE standards were expected to reduce its annual pickup exports by 10,000 units in 2018, 30,000 in 2020, and 100,000 in the future. 

Toyota expects to ship a total of 314,000 automobiles from Thailand this year.

Twelve countries have applied CAFE standards, including Japan, the United States, the European Union, China and South Korea.

Ninnart said that since these standards also required each automaker to meet specified emission levels, adding HVs that emit fewer pollutants to Thailand’s automobile export fleet would help alleviate the impacts.

 

EVs face obstacles

He said the government should start with standard HVs before promoting plug-in hybrids (PHVs), and later fuel-cell vehicles (FHVs) and electric vehicles (EVs), which still face some obstacles to widespread adoption by motorists. 

“Toyota uses hybrids as the common platform for developing EVs, PHVs and FCVs,” he said.

Toyota has sold 8 million HVs worldwide, while EVs currently have only a 0.3-per-cent share of Japan’s automobile market.

Piyasvasti Amranand, chairman of PTT, said the benefits from EVs would be reduced significantly if the electricity powering such cars still had to be principally generated by fossil fuels. 

Therefore, any EV-promotion policy should be implemented in alignment with the development of renewable energy.

“If all passenger cars, vans and pickups were shifted to electric, the country’s power demand would rise by 50 per cent. 

“If EVs are promoted too quickly while electricity still comes from power plants fuelled by coal and natural gas, it might not be appropriate,” he said.

Piyasvasti said the government’s promotion policy should be open in terms of technologies since it is still debatable whether EVs, hybrids or other automobile technologies will eventually win the race.

EV costs should also be considered systematically, since their actual costs might not be much different to hybrid diesel vehicles if taxes levied on petroleum products were excluded, he said.

The Energy Policy and Planning Office yesterday said in a statement that the government’s plan to promote EV usage to total 1.2 million vehicles by 2036 would help the country to save Bt17 billion in fuel costs annually.