Tue Feb 18th, 2025

Electric cars: beneficial for the consumer, but not for the Israeli economy

January 10, 2025 , ,
Photo: Craig Adderley/Pexels.Photo: Craig Adderley/Pexels.

The National Economic Council of the Prime Minister's Office of Israel published a report that examines the effects of the production and sale of electric cars at the national level.

The report's data suggests that electric cars will bring savings to consumers in 2024. However, their impact on the Israeli economy was not as positive due to the current tax policy.

In 2024, the average cost of an electric car to the consumer was NIS 3.700 less than that of a gasoline vehicle. The difference is due to their lower operating and maintenance costs. By 2034, annual savings for consumers are estimated to increase to NIS 3.500 per vehicle.

However, under the current tax policy, electric cars generated an additional cost of NIS 740 per unit for the Israeli economy in 2024, but it is expected that this cost can be reduced in the next decade, reaching a total cost of NIS 1.600 less than a regular car for each electric car.

Furthermore, according to the report, achieving the goals set by the Ministry of Energy and Infrastructure on the adoption of electric vehicles will generate an economic benefit of NIS 1.200 billion for the country.

5 thoughts on “Electric cars: beneficial for the consumer, but not for the Israeli economy”
  1. When it comes to buying a car, an electric one is much more expensive than an equivalent petrol one, without government aid almost nobody would buy one, but it has many other advantages apart from the lower long-term cost, the main one being ecology, especially in recent years when climate change is becoming more and more evident every day, there are little left but Trump and his followers, or also the right-wing and fascist Spaniards, continuing the old or self-interested anti-ecological slogans. The fires in California, the summer temperatures that last until autumn or even a few days in winter, extreme atmospheric phenomena, etc. make more citizens open their eyes or at least care to inform themselves without the influence of sectarian ideologies. And it is that in countries like Spain it is the left, especially the communists, who monopolize the ideology of environmentalism, almost the major Spanish communist parties carry ecology as their flag, while the right and the fascists direct the Spanish towards the stupidity of anti-environmentalism, that is why Spain is one of the countries with the most hours of sunshine in Europe but barely has solar panel installations, only in recent years have some companies started to offer these products because the government now gives some aid for their installation and has made the procedures a little easier to receive money in exchange for surplus energy.

  2. In the case of electric cars, Spain is also one of the European countries at the bottom of the list. The essential network of chargers is very poor throughout Spain and many of those that exist are of low quality, or electric cars and other electric vehicles are barely seen circulating on Spanish streets, even though Spaniards constantly see them in television advertisements and on YouTube. They don't even buy them with government subsidies, which are no small thing, up to 7.000 euros for cars, or 1.300 euros for electric motorcycles, but there is no way, not even now that these vehicles have improved much more and the cost has dropped, especially due to the new electric cars from China. Or some electric motorcycles equivalent to 125 cc, which many Spaniards can drive without a special license for motorcycles, have a power and top speed much higher than gasoline ones, being the Spaniards, especially the kids, great fans of going at full speed or at full throttle, and speed is one of the arguments of a kind of popular movement that has spread among the Spaniards against electric vehicles. The other big argument is the purchase price, apart from many other conspiracy hoaxes, or they complain that they cannot make long trips like those with gasoline or diesel, when many never leave the province where they live, for example I have hardly ever needed to travel more than 100 km, most of the time I take the car for a few kilometers or for 20-30 km at most. With a charger in the home or garage, whose installation permits are provided by the Spanish government, the cost per kilometer is much lower than the equivalent in gasoline, so to take advantage of this you also have to be at least a little foresighted or have some of what many Spaniards surely understand by being Jewish, naturally they understand this in a derogatory way.

  3. Now, with the far right on the rise in Spain, where it suddenly appeared to thwart the rise of the communists after the subprime crisis, which took a particularly hard toll on the very classist Spanish society, they will surely have to raise some ecological banner. And I have found that even the followers of the sect of Jehovah's Witnesses, when they go knocking on doors to recruit new followers, now also argue that ecology is one of the concerns that are resolved by joining their sect because God has the solution. In Spain, the right and the fascists have always been anti-ecology, they are equal or worse than the worst American Republicans, only a few Spanish neo-Nazis have been seen joining animalist protests by communists against bulls, even though it is a taboo subject among the right and the Spanish fascists, only because Hitler or the Nazis are said to have been an ecological party, they were very fond of exalting the German countryside and forest, or they also enacted laws to protect animals. Although Hitler was a vegetarian and was very fond of his dog Blondie, this supposed ecology seems more like a forced interpretation of tradition by agrarianism as the essence of the German race, or by the interests of the many noble owners of large tracts of land and their inhabitants, landowners who existed in Germany at that time together with separatist quarrels, as was Bismarck himself, the architect of the unification of Germany at the end of the 19th century. Another possible motive for this particular Nazi environmentalism could well have been the extinct medieval Cathar religion that the Nazis incorporated into their crazy conglomeration of pagan and occult beliefs. Catharism was a medieval European religion, for some unknown reason the German Nazis became fond of Catharism influenced by a certain Otto Rahn, a homosexual Nazi, whom the Nazis hired as one of their great experts in occultism, he was the one who instilled in them the wonders of Catharism, until the Nazis got fed up with him due to the lack of evidence or conclusive results, and murdered him, or it is also speculated that one day he went naked to the icy peak of a mountain, to reflect in the Cathar style, and there he stayed. In the Middle Ages, the Cathars were exterminated by the Catholic Church for being heretics, although they were very similar to the Catholics of the time, for example they preached salvation through asceticism and the strict rejection of the material world, perceived by the Cathars as the work of the devil.

  4. Curiously, during the Spanish fascist dictatorship, the Nazi-loving Falangists did not try to completely destroy the differences of each region, which is the great problem they have in Spain with rural or village traditions, due to the separatist regions, but with one of their usual juggling acts they turned each regional difference into something beneficial and even characteristic of the Spanish race, including the languages, or rather dialects according to them, of the separatist regions, separatist regions that are also very fond of exalting the rural and their own folklore, for example the separatism of the Catalans has its origin in a peasant revolt against Spain, or the Basques preserve many rural traditions, very different from those seen in Spain, which they promote and respect a lot. A large part of the work of preserving local traditions, when many were almost extinct, was entrusted to their fascist women. The Women's Section of the Falange was in charge of first studying them and then dictating the costumes, song lyrics, dances and food of the Spanish regions, remodeled to their taste or according to their whims, without any historical criteria. They simply followed the strict modest rules of the Spanish Catholic Church, and more or less unified folkloric traditions into one for all similar towns or provinces. So surely many of these invented regional Spanish traditions of today, which are still very much alive and serve to give tourists an image of the most traditional Spain, are the same ones invented by these inept, capricious fascist Falangists. «In the Choirs and Dances, their competitions and exhibitions, a reconstructed folkloric spectacle appears, in which the mediation of the instructors of the Women's Section played a fundamental role, given that the collection of information in the villages and the instruction of the local groups depended on rules and techniques that had nothing to do with the maintenance of traditional local customs and styles. On the contrary, as can be seen in the forms that the instructors had to send to the Central Culture Council in Madrid, the lack of determination in the collection of data, on the one hand, and, on the other, the homologation of the music and dance samples to standardized patterns is the norm. Added to this is the amateurish dedication of the members and the general lack of technical means for the work of compilation. However, efforts were also made to maintain the "prestige" of folklore work, for example, by inviting Ramón Menéndez Pidal to write the prologue for the book Canciones y danzas de España (1953) or by establishing, through the Vice-Secretariat of Popular Education of the Ministry of Education, the National Folklore Prize, the first edition of which, in 1945, went to Manuel García Matos. The Women's Section itself, in this as in the other areas of its activity, had absolute control over the three functions of its work: recovery, teaching and dissemination. In terms of folklore work, it created a body of Regional Dance and Music Instructors, who were trained with the texts and methods published by the organization in its National and Provincial Command Schools. But there are also other elements that inevitably led to the mystification and falsification of the original folkloric styles. The first is of a moral nature and entailed the censorship of any cultural or formal element that was not in accordance with the national-Catholic ideology. Thus, the anticlerical or antireligious lyrics of the songs were changed, or we have that until 1957 all the dances were performed only by women, although the vast majority were mixed dances. As regards the regional costumes worn at dances, for example, according to the members and participants in the Choirs and Dances themselves, the costumes included as traditional underwear the famous bloomers or shorts gathered at the leg, which were also required to be worn under skirts when practising sports. Other changes marked by clothing decency were applied to necklines and sleeve length in several cases and to the interpretation of the dances themselves. Equally important is the mandatory rule that groups and choirs had to dedicate themselves to learning and practicing the repertoires of their respective "province", so that the local character of many manifestations, be it dances or costumes or songs, is constantly confused with their provincial and, if applicable, regional assimilation.

  5. After all, and paradoxically, the same people who destroyed Spanish traditions were the last to see them. This manipulative work by the Falangist women represents a historically valuable reference for many regional costumes, or for some of their original parts copied from real traditional costumes, and related crafts that have already been lost. One of the most complete pieces of information available to the public about substitutes for Spanish regional costumes in the Women's Section is the description of many of the pieces that made up each of the 50 provincial costumes given to Eva Perón during her famous visit to Francoist Spain, a collection that is offered through the internet portal Acceder (Digital Content Network of the Cultural Heritage of the Argentine Ministry of Culture). The Spanish fascists and pro-Nazis managed to manipulate the Spanish people into equating rural life with modernity, and regional differences with the fascist centralism, almost absurd of these Spanish fascists, and a centralism that is still very much in force today even with democracies, it was in a prodigious exercise of tightrope walking, when every Spaniard who prides himself on being one knows that these Spanish fascists are country men and women with little or nothing, some are snobs, or want to be, they only use Spanish traditions as picturesque customs of the rabble or to teach them to foreigners. The same could be said of their supposed policies supporting the urban working classes, a few years ago the left criticized the political campaigns of the Spanish right wing by making a joke that any Spaniard who prides himself on being one could understand, about the obligatory electoral visits to the working class neighborhoods, where the politicians of the right wing Popular Party seemed like a fish out of water. Now it is not so much the left that makes this joke, the right and the Spanish fascists have learned to counteract it, they have become more expert in populism or in manipulating the Spanish working classes as well.

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