Singapore plans to abandon gasoline and diesel cars by 2040

Tesla is a very welcome car all over the world. In addition to being a luxury vehicle that are smart and have Autopilot in their arsenal, they are also electric vehicles. Since today, the problems of climate change are in the forefront, many people are trying to switch to electric cars.

Singapore is a wealthy city-state with a population of 5.7 million people. The government has made large investments in flood protection, and together with other countries has set the goal of reducing the use of cars with internal combustion engines.

In early February, the UK government announced that ready to ban hybrid and other gas-powered vehicles by 2035. The date originally set for the ban was 2040, but the UK government moved up the date after experts said that it would be too late by then for the country to achieve its zero-carbon-emissions goal for 2050.

According to Reuters, the Finance Minister of Singapore, said today that the city-state plans to follow the lead of other countries and aims to phase out petrol and diesel vehicles by 2040, making a bigger bet on electric cars as part of its efforts to cut greenhouse gases and fight climate change.

"Our vision is to phase out ICE and have vehicles run on cleaner energy by 2040," Finance Minister Heng Swee Keat said, adding that this goal is for "both public health and climate change reasons".

Finance Minister Heng Swee Keat / Photo by Tobias Schreiner

1. The emissions scheme for vehicles, which determines tax breaks and surcharges depending on the level of vehicle emissions, will be extended to light commercial vehicles.
2. From 2021 to 2023, an incentive scheme for early adoption will be introduced for buyers of electric vehicles. It will offer a discount of $20,000 per car.
3. The road tax for electric cars and some hybrids will be revised to become less punitive.
4. Singapore will significantly expand its electric vehicle charging infrastructure from 1,600 points to 28,000 by 2030.

But since the excise tax on fuel sales is about $1 billion a year, Heng said the government will introduce a one-time tax on electric cars from 2021, starting at $100, then $200 in 2022 and $350 from 2023.

Earlier, residents of the Singapore, asked Tesla CEO Elon Musk, to make it possible to buy Tesla cars for them. But he could not help them, since the country's policy was directed against EV as a whole.

Singapore is one of the most expensive places in the world where you can buy a car. It controls the vehicle population through a tendering system for the right to own and use the vehicle for a limited number of years. A middle-class car in Singapore can be up to four times more expensive than a similar car in the United States.

The country is an oil refining center, which previously could have made it difficult for the government to adopt a policy of electrifying cars. At the moment, the environmental situation in the city-state has worsened, which may have led to a revision of attitudes towards EV.

“As a low-lying island nation, rising sea levels threatens our very existence,” Heng said, adding that he was setting aside a coastal and flood protection fund with an initial injection of $3.6 billion. Last year, he said Singapore’s defense against rising sea levels could cost $72 billion or more over 100 years.

At the moment, Singapore plans to expand the charging infrastructure for the population to 28,000 points by 2030, currently there are 1,600.

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Featured image: ST FILE