The US spending bill just agreed to last night includes extension of tax credits for home EV charger installations, electric motorcycles, and fuel-cell vehicles.

These credits were previously extended through the end of 2017, though that time the extension was retroactive, as taxpayers didn’t know about the incentive during the incentive period. Now, those credits have been extended retroactively again — covering the last two years, since 2017. They’ve also been extended forward through the end of 2020.

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Marie Sapirie of E&E’s Tax Notes group reports on some potential big developments for the US federal EV tax credit contained in a draft bill, the ‘‘Growing Renewable Energy and Efficiency Now Act of 2019’’ or ‘‘GREEN Act of 2019’’. The draft is being promoted by Congressman Mike Thompson (D-CA), a member of the powerful Ways & Means committee, which is the chief tax-writing committee in the US House of Representatives. That means this draft bill should be taken seriously. The bill is a potential huge win for Tesla and General Motors, for whom the existing credit has almost fully extinguished.

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Newly proposed legislation in Congress would extend a number of alternative fuel tax credits, but it wouldn’t make any changes to the $7,500 EV credit.

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With a new Republican-backed effort to expand the electric vehicle federal tax credit, the Koch brothers are urging senators to vote against it – putting their political donation dollars at work. expand full story

At a time when most governments are looking at ways to encourage electric vehicle adoption, a Republican senator has now introduced a new bill to end the $7,500 federal tax credit for electric cars and instead tax them more. expand full story

Some politicians and electric utilities are now pushing the idea to remove the cap of 200,000 electric vehicles sold per manufacturer in order to get access to the federal tax credit just as Tesla and GM are about to hit the threshold. expand full story

Congratulations to anyone who bought an electric car last year, as today, Congress took action to retroactively extend several tax credits, and among them were credits for EV charging infrastructure, fuel cell vehicles and electric motorcycles.

A lot of people know about the $7,500 federal tax credit for electric vehicle purchases, but there are a number of other incentives available to EV buyers which help to offset initial costs.  These include today’s newly-extended 30% rebate (up to $1,000) on costs associated with the installation of an EV charging station, a 10% credit (up to $2,500) on 2- or 3-wheeled electric vehicles such as electric motorcycles, and a $4,000 credit for the purchase of a new fuel cell vehicle.

These credits had previously expired at the end of 2016, and today were extended retroactively through the end of 2017.  Anyone who purchased an electric motorcycle, a fuel cell vehicle, or spent money on a charging installation in 2017 can qualify for these credits on their 2017 tax return.

**CORRECTION: A previous version of this article stated that the credit was available for 2018, as the original Senate bill stated.  The bill as passed only extends the credit through the end of 2017, though.  Apparently we will have to wait to see if they ever decide to extend the credit for 2018, compounding the problem mentioned below about retroactive incentives.

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All the information Tesla dropped on investors and analysts this week with their third quarter financial results is being processed by the market right now, and the market unsurprisingly doesn’t like it.

Tesla’s stock (TSLA) took a 7% hit down to $300 per share yesterday, but beyond Tesla’s quarterly results, it looks like the announcement that the GOP plans the remove the $7,500 federal tax credit for electric cars also hurt the stock a lot.

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Tesla CEO Elon Musk finally released more details about the reservations process for the upcoming Model 3 launch and it gives us an interesting opportunity to discuss the implications of the vehicle’s introduction on Tesla’s limit for the $7,500 federal tax credit for electric vehicles.

We’ve heard some discussion in EV industry about the implications of GM advertising the Bolt’s pricing as “$30,000 after incentives” and in contrast, Tesla is talking about the Model 3’s starting price as being “$35,000 before incentives”. expand full story