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Electric cars are too expensive, some people say. Well, that may be true in some cases, especially if a customer wants a pickup truck with a big battery like a Rivian or Ford F-150 Lightning. However, for a lucky few, the price of admission to the world of electric car mobility may be substantially lower, if they happen to live in Vermont or Colorado.

Vermont has become one of the most proactive states in America when it comes to addressing the onrushing climate crisis. That’s because it has been ravaged time and time again by floods that have caused massive destruction. The Green Mountain State, unsurprisingly, has a lot of green mountains, and in between those mountains are steep valleys. Under normal conditions, when it rains in Vermont, the water runs down into those valleys and into Vermont’s rivers, which carry the water away in due course to destinations further south.

The problem is, over the past ten years or so, Vermont has experienced heavier than normal rains on a regular basis, rains so heavy that they have overwhelmed the cities and towns in the valleys below. Often, those rains are from the tail end of hurricanes that move northward, dumping their cargo of moisture as they go. A decade ago, Bill McKibben was home in Vermont when one such hurricane devastated his hometown. He wrote about how rising temperatures in the atmosphere contribute to those heavier rainfall events in his book Oil And Honey way back in 2013.

The mechanics of the problem are really quite simple. Warmer air holds more moisture than cooler air. More moisture means heavier rain. What is not so simple is reducing the human activity that increases the average temperature of the atmosphere — burning fossil fuels. One of the consequences of the floods Vermont has been experiencing lately — including earlier this year when the remnants of Hurricane Beryl dumped six inches of rain on the state in a matter of a few hours — is a sharp increase in the number of flood-damaged vehicles. Cars don’t react well to being underwater, so many of those cars have to be scrapped.

Vermont Expands Electric Car Incentives

Vermont already has one of the most aggressive programs to help residents switch to electric cars. Called Replace Your Ride, it provides up to $6,000 to EV buyers, but there is an added bonus. If the buyer trades in an existing gasoline- or diesel-powered car, there is a sweetener of an additional $5,000. Combined with a federal tax credit of up to $7,500, that allows Vermonters to knock a total of $18,500 off the price of an electric car, but there was a catch until recently.

To qualify for the $5,000 incentive for trading in a conventional car, that vehicle had to be at least 10 years old, in working condition, and currently registered and inspected. But because of the number of flood-damaged cars after Hurricane Beryl, the cars no longer need to be 10 years old. The state now says, “For Vermonters impacted by the 2024 flood events, vehicles totaled by the flooding may be scrapped, regardless of age.” The vehicles don’t have to be in working condition or even able to start, Kelley Blue Book reports.

If you want to buy a used electric car instead of a new one? Vermont still has attractive purchase incentives for those customers as well. The new car bonus doesn’t apply, of course, but the $5,000 for scrapping a flood-damaged car still does, plus low-income Vermonters may qualify for an additional $5,000 bonus when they buy a used electric car. Combine that with the federal used EV tax credit of $4,000 and the total comes to $14,000. The federal credit only applies to cars priced at $25,000 or less, so if all the criteria are met, a low-income Vermonter could be parking a $25,000 used electric car in the driveway for just $11,000.

Colorado Dealer Offers $19 A Month Lease On New Nissan LEAF

Colorado is another state that is offering aggressive incentives to people who decide to switch to an electric car. The state has adopted a number of strategies to slash its carbon emissions by 2030. Since emissions from the transportation sector are a major contributor to the state’s total emissions, Colorado has put a number of strategies in place to help get cars and trucks with lower emissions on its roads.

Those strategies are working. In the second quarter of 2024, registrations of battery electric vehicles rebounded to 16 percent of all vehicle registrations after a slight dip in the beginning of the year, according to a report from the Colorado Auto Dealers Association. Over the first half of 2024, the total electric car market share in the first half of 2024 is up nearly 5 percent from a year earlier.

Tynan’s Nissan, a dealership in Aurora, Colorado, is offering a 24 month lease on a Nissan LEAF for $19 per month after taxes and dealer fees. The customer must pay about $2,400 in sales taxes and dealer fees up front, but then the Colorado incentives plus an incentive from Xcel Energy can provide up to $8,100 in benefits. In a lease, that amount is applied to the value of the lease, not the total price of the car. “That is definitely a contributing factor to why you can get such inexpensive leases,” Matthew Groves, the CEO of the Colorado Auto Dealers Association, told Colorado Public Radio. “The flexibility is something that does not exist in other states, and that has largely been a product of our cooperation between the industry and the government.”

The $19 a month lease at Tynan’s Nissan is for a base model LEAF, which has a range of only 149 miles and the now outmoded CHAdeMO charging standard. That car may not be the first choice of many drivers, but may be ideal for some, especially when the cost of motoring is less than what a golf cart would cost.

The EV lease deal went viral online after a YouTube channel featured the special in early July, kicking off a wave of coverage on auto blogs and TikTok accounts. 184 customers have since taken advantage of the offer and 117 are waiting for more cars to arrive at the dealership. Because the Colorado electric car incentives enable dealers to structure bargains around publicly funded discounts, a wave of cheap lease deals on battery-powered cars has popped up across the state. As a result, Colorado now competes with Washington for the second highest EV market share after California. In response, carmakers and dealers have pumped cars into the state, increasing supply and cutting vehicle costs.

One of the benefits of such low-cost leases is that they allow drivers who might not otherwise try an electric car to experiment with the new technology for very little money. Perhaps they will enjoy the experience so much that when the lease is up, they will remain in the electric car camp. In that respect, these leases could prove to be a gateway to the electric car future for some Colorado drivers.

The Takeaway

What we can learn from this is that policies matter. The Nissan LEAF is enjoying a bit of a moment in Colorado because of those policies, while in Florida, Nissan dealers often don’t even mention them on their websites. Both Vermont and Colorado have dedicated themselves to policies designed to lower their carbon emissions, while many of their sister states are thumbing their noses at the specter of global heating because they prefer ideology over science. Soon we will see which strategy is better.