California Clean Fuel Reward surpasses 250,000 point-of-sale financial incentives for EV buyers; More than $319M provided to EV customers
10 May 2022
More than 250,000 Californians have now received a financial Clean Fuel Reward at the point of sale when they purchased or leased a plug-in electric vehicle—an important milestone for this program after only 18 months since it began.
The California Air Resources Board’s California Clean Fuel Reward program provides an instant price reduction of up to $750 at the point of sale or lease for eligible new plug-in electric vehicles at participating retailers. Since the program launch in November 2020, more than $319 million in rewards have been received by EV buyers. Of the total rewards, 21.2% of incentives went to customers in underserved communities, 10% to customers in low-income communities and another 10% to customers in disadvantaged communities.
CARB and car dealers alike had been seeking a program to help support the sale of plug-in cars that involved making funds immediately available at the dealership, as opposed to other incentive programs that required applications and a waiting period to receive them. After two years of discussion and collaboration between the California Air Resources Board, the California Public Utilities Commission and electric utilities throughout the state the California Clean Fuel Reward was launched on 17 November 2020. It proved immensely popular: Within six weeks, 741 retailers representing nearly 90% of the EV market had been approved to participate.
The California Clean Fuel Reward Program is administered by Southern California Edison in collaboration with electric utilities across the state, giving all Californians the ability to receive the reward, regardless of their electric utility provider.
Funded by credits generated by utilities in the Low Carbon Fuel Standard (LCFS), the California Clean Fuel Reward makes electric vehicles even more affordable to a broad group of customers due to few eligibility restrictions and its ability to be stacked with other federal, state and local rewards. The LCFS is designed to reduce the carbon intensity of California’s transportation fuel pool and provide low-carbon and renewable alternatives, reducing air pollution and the state’s dependency on petroleum.
The reward amount depends on the vehicle battery capacity where vehicles with a battery capacity of 16 kilowatt-hours (kWh) or greater would receive the full reward and vehicles with smaller capacities would receive a prorated reward down to 5 kWh.
These programs have a huge flaw in being too complicated to get approved and being only for dealers (new and used) which add a huge mark up that takes most or all the rebate. So the rebate goes mostly to the dealers. Dealers are so corrupt that in forums people call the, stealerships. Just search on youtube or Google for "dealership scammed scam ripoff overcharged..." you will find so many examples and help on how to avoid getting fleeced. There is a whole industry of middle middle men who help avoid the new car buying hassles... To need that is insane!
Just like SCE Edison allows used EV's from anyone to get a rebate, the state funded rebates should be allowed from Tesla direct sales and 3rd party private used cars.
And direct to customer car sales should be allowed by federal law.
The dealership system is a bunch of mafia middlemen that are obsolete. They mentally tortue you until you are worn down so much that you overpay by overlooking all the scam fees in the sales contract.
Posted by: GdB | 10 May 2022 at 11:37 AM
How many people pay MSRP at a stealership?
Posted by: GdB | 10 May 2022 at 11:38 AM
at the point of sale
Don't charge state sales tax
Posted by: SJC | 10 May 2022 at 03:33 PM