In Brief:
The average American drives about 13,500 miles a year. Some people, such as delivery drivers, ride-share drivers and people with especially long commutes, clock many more. As states work to meet carbon-reduction goals by urging residents to buy electric vehicles, one city has started targeting its highest-mileage drivers with extra incentives to switch to EVs.
The Burlington Electric Department, the electric utility in Burlington, Vt., now offers $250 and $500 incentives to income-qualified residents who drive an average of two or three times the city average. Those incentives are on top of existing rebates of up to $3,000 that the utility offers to customers who buy new or pre-owned EVs, along with other state and federal rebates worth thousands more.
By targeting gasoline “superusers,” the city hopes to maximize the impact of EV incentives. Getting one superuser to switch from a gas-powered car to an EV has several times the emissions-reduction impact as the typical driver. It also saves those drivers lots of money on gas and translates to more kilowatt hours that the utility can charge for. Launched this spring, Burlington’s program is still the only active superuser incentive in the country. But it’s an idea that other jurisdictions are starting to explore.
Faster Emissions Reductions
Vermont enacted a law last summer that allowed the Burlington utility to create an EV incentive for gas superusers. This was motivated partly based on research from a nonprofit group called Coltura. The group has released a series of reports on gasoline superusers, which it defines as the top 10 percent of gas consumers.
According to Coltura, that top 10 percent of light-duty vehicle drivers consumes 35 percent of all the gasoline purchased for light-duty vehicle use in the U.S. There are about 21 million superusers in the U.S., and they use about 10 percent of all the gasoline in the world, according to the group.
The federal government, along with many states and cities, has ambitious climate goals, and offers cash incentives for EV buyers in hopes of accelerating their emissions reductions. But the incentives only go so far, says Rob Sargent, Coltura’s policy director. “There’s no way we’re going to meet the transportation share of greenhouse gas emissions reductions we need to achieve without, for lack of a better word, supercharging the programs that are designed to do that,” he says.
Government incentives for EV purchases have often been criticized as handouts for wealthy city-dwellers who were already planning to make the switch. But Sargent and others think gearing incentives more toward superusers could help shift that narrative.
Most gas superusers live in rural areas, according to Coltura’s research, while less than a tenth live in cities. Most also have household incomes below $100,000 a year. The average superuser spends more than 10 percent of their income on gas. Superusers who are Black spend almost 15 percent of their income on gas.
Incentivizing those drivers to adopt EVs could help states achieve climate goals more quickly, while also helping residents save money. “If you’re going to spend X amount of dollars on putting someone behind the wheel of an EV, let’s get the most bang for that buck,” Sargent says.
Even states that don’t have financial incentives for EVs could get a benefit from focusing on superusers, Sargent says. Many superusers may not know how much money they could save if they gave up gas. There is still a cultural divide around EVs, even as they slowly make up a larger share of U.S. vehicle purchase.
But the idea of incentivizing superusers is taking hold in some places. “Almost everybody that looks at the concept finds it intriguing — and, up until recently, has put it on a shelf and said ‘This is something we’ll look at later,’” Sargent says.
States Consider Bonuses
Vermont has the only legislature that’s adopted a law permitting an incentive. But lawmakers in Washington allocated funding for a study of gas superusers a few years ago. Maryland’s Commission on Climate Change proposed a superuser bonus in a report last year and the recommendation was included in the state’s Climate Pollution Reduction Plan.
An estimated 10 percent of Maryland drivers consume about 30 percent of its gas. Some state lawmakers are considering introducing legislation to create the superuser bonus, according to a spokesman for the Maryland Department of the Environment.
California state Rep. Phil Ting, who represents parts of San Francisco and San Mateo County, has introduced bills three times, including this year, to create a EV incentive for gas superusers. California already offers state incentives for EV purchases, and leads all other states in EV adoption. But the transition has been uneven.
“One of the critiques with all the incentives is they go toward wealthier coastal residents, and they need to go toward more diverse, lower-income working-class people, who are really the ones driving the longest distance to their jobs,” Ting says. “If we could convert them from dirty cars into clean cars, then we could really have a huge amount of savings, not just in terms of CO2, but particulate matter and air quality as well.”
Ting’s bill was passed by the state Assembly but not the Senate. The agencies already have a lot of components to the system. Ting, who is leaving office at the end of the year, says the agencies that administer California’s existing incentives haven’t been as receptive to the Legislature’s recommendations as he would like.
But Ting believes the superuser policy will eventually take hold, in California and elsewhere. “This is the next evolution of what an incentive program should look like,” he says.
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