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He suggested that manufacturers could have inflated prices and have “room to manoeuvre” to reduce them.
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But car dealers say the loss of the rebate will slow the sale of electric vehicles in the province.
In his budget presented the day before, the minister of finance, Eric Girard, announced the gradual reduction in the rebate, which will go from $7,000 to $4,000 per new electric vehicle starting Jan. 1, then at $2,000 on Jan. 1, 2026, going to zero in 2027.
“It could have an impact on the price of the model,” Charette said during a press scrum in a corridor of the National Assembly before a cabinet meeting.
“Manufacturers have room to manoeuvre. As we can see, there are certain manufacturers who, in recent months, have made fairly significant reductions in the price of their vehicles. So that will probably encourage them to continue the declines.”
Like his colleague Girard the day before, he affirmed that the cost of the program for each tonne of emissions reduction was “excessively high.”
But he said the Roulez vert program was nevertheless a “very, very big success.”
He pledged to invest the money in a program “with more convincing results.”
But environmental group Equiterre said in a statement that the province isn’t funding public transit adequately to give people alternatives to private vehicles that would bring a more serious decline in greenhouse gas emissions.
Meanwhile, the head of Quebec’s automobile dealers association says the decision to end the rebate will slow the province’s shift to cleaner cars.
Ian Sam Yue Chi of the Corporation des concessionnaires d’automobiles said Wednesday the rebate makes a big difference for consumers.
He said that because another Quebec law requires automobile manufacturers to distribute electric vehicles in Quebec, dealers could be stuck with cars they can’t sell.
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