Four months ago the state of California announced a $4.1 million $3.7ish million dollar program to stimulate the electric vehicle economy. The Clean Vehicle Rebate Project, through CARB, and administered by CCSE (California Center for Sustainable Energy), basically gives $5,000 to each purchaser of a EV (or EV-like approved vehicle) until the funds dry up.
The kick to would-be LEAF owners is that it took effect on March 15 of this year, and as mentioned earlier, the pot is pretty small. 3.7 million only gives out 740-odd rebates (not including the fact that zero emission commercial vehicles can also qualify for a $20,000 piece of the pie)
So, being 4 months into the program, and about 4 months before the first shiny, new LEAFs are dropped off at various driveways around California, just how many Tesla Roadsters, GEM/Miles NEV and sexy, sexy Navistar estars (click the link if you dare) have eaten into the program so far, and for how much?
Well I don’t know the breakdown, although wouldn’t that be great to know? But how much money left is not such a guarded secret in the state of California.
Program to date: Rebates Already Issued – $208,200, Currently Reserved – $37,300. Leaving the remaining funds sitting comfortably at $3,477,956, and because I am wicked good dividing numbers by 5, that means about 695 full rebates are left in the kitty.
That is a burn rate of almost 7% for the first four months, and allowing for a slight ramp up in, well, quite frankly really ugly commercial and NEV vehicles over the next four months, we are probably looking at about 20% of the program (or $750,000) being eaten up before Nissan LEAF owns swoop in and obliterate the funds at the end of the year.
UPDATE: The good news that just last month CARB approved another 5 million in rebates, which as of now, will go into effect fiscal year 2011 which actually starts July 1st, 2011. (Thanks to Shannon)
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Source: nissan-leaf.net
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