New gov scrappage grant of 8500

And quarries. The roads leading from quarries to works are destroyed.

As the scheme is very limited a Hyundai dealer might try to avoid or ghost a customer looking to scrap a car against an inster where the amount of profit to be earned is small and try to hold on to the scheme for an ioniq 5 or larger. Only about 2k vehicles will be covered by this.

Fanciful at best. Dealers have no "capacity to hold on the scheme". It is consumers who decide on this scheme.

Besides very little profit in most new mainstream cars. New car sales is about volume & turnover as they are purchased by dealers on credit.

Also makes no sense to ghost a customer and miss the opportunity to make decent profit by up-selling with optional extras like extended warranties, paint or fabric protection, finance etc.

For everyone else. That's the point. People keep picking larger and heavier vehicles for their own individual safety while disregarding that a) they are making everyone else less safe & b) leading to an ever-increasing size and weight of vehicles (if all other vehicles get larger, you'll want an even larger vehicle than you have now).

If that’s your honest opinion, I’d suggest you take a trip down the country to see what vehicular traffic actually travels the rural road network on a daily basis. You won’t find any taxis either.

How many new car models are smaller than the previous generation. If someone wanted to buy it.

The grant is paid by the state, not the dealers so it makes no difference if they give it on a cheap car or an expensive one. Also there's a 10m fund and 5k grants so it will be exactly 2k vehicles being covered by this

The temporary subsidies on fuel duty will be ending at the end of July, possibly sooner because of the recent lowering of prices at the pump, so there should be money in the coffers to hand out more grants in 2027

The government is legally committed to certain emissions goals by 2030, and a large part of that comes from our Irish vehicle fleet.

To meet our goal we need to have 850,000 EVs on the road by 2030, and its at the moment at about 150,000.

Thats whats prompted this, and will prompt much larger schemes the closer we get to 2030. The state needs hundreds of thousands more EVs on the road than we have, or are projected to have based on current sales figures.

€10mn a year for the cost for the current pilot scheme, or even 10x that for a much larger scheme next year, is a tiny fraction of the billions of euros of potential fines the country faces.

(theres also the significant other positive side effects of lower pollution levels locally, less dependence on importing foreign fuel, safer / more modern cars on the roads etc etc)

The govt did say recently that they were unlikely to meet the 850,000 EVs (which was an initial target of 1m) on the road by 2030. My guess is the govt basically just shrugged their shoulders and said "sure f**k it" but the EU is coming along with fines for non-compliance so that's focused their minds somewhat

The very high margin cars are likely the ones that cost over 50k and they would be ineligible for this grant. Whether the grant goes on an Inster or an Ioniq is irrelevant

Was it even a cost-saving exercise, or just a sop to the motoring community that believes "EV drivers get everything"?

Or, option 3, the EU reduces the 2030 emissions targets and we avoid the fines that way.

Given the EUs historical attitude to delaying targets that are unachievable, the 2030 2035 2040 ICE ban comes to mind, I'd say you're correct though

You're quite far off reality there. The 2023 targets were much, much easier to hit than the 2030 targets. They're not equivalent at all.

Only seven EU countries are on track to hit the 2030 targets as of mid-2026, and that includes none of the largest states. Its only Bulgaria, Croatia, Czechia, Denmark, Greece, and Portugal.

Which means mathematically there just simply won't be anywhere near enough credits to sell from creditor countries to debtor countries. That by itself would break the planned system.

But even aside from that, just financially, Germany, Italy and France are not going to let the current goals for 2030 result in them paying tens of billions of euros of fines each, from already stretched government budgets. And they're the ones who largely set EU policy.

The 2030 goals won't be abandoned entirely, because that would be a huge admission of defeat. But they'll definitely be pushed back to either 2035 or 2040. One to three more election cycles away from the late 2020s, so they can be "more achievable" (and/or another government's problem).