“Green vehicles” lack a consistent concept to turn preferential policies into reality

Prestige studies show that environmental pollution in large cities is becoming more and more serious, resulting from both production, consumption and especially public transport. The picture that shows "air congestion" in Beijing (China) has obsessed many people.

In large cities including Vietnam, means of transport are considered to be the main factors of gas emissions producing toxic substances like CO, Pb, NOx ...

Facing this threat, the governments of big automobile markets like UK, France, China ... have planned to ban the sale of gasoline-powered cars. In other countries, green vehicle supportive policies are also flexible applied such as reduce in registration tax and road tax, tax incentives on credit, even tax exemptions...

In developed countries, tax incentives are one of the key tools in stimulating consumer demand for "green vehicles" and considered as the encouragement for the automakers to research, design and manufacture car models with more high performance and fuel efficiency. Thereby, this contributes indirectly to the protection of limited fossil resources, which are becoming increasingly scarce.

Due to the drastic actions from governments, many automakers have been constantly innovating their technology to market fuel efficient and eco-friendly vehicles.

There are currently four types of green vehicles in the world including electric vehicle; "hybrid electric vehicle"; plug-in hybrid electric vehicle and fuel cell vehicle.

“Green” concept is inconsistently defined

In Vietnam, the government has also caught up with the world's "greening" trend and issued a number of policies for hybrid electric vehicle, or hybrid vehicle for nearly 10 years.

However, implementation of the policies still faces difficulties due to inconsistent definition and interpretation of “hybrid vehicle". This makes the relevant agencies struggled with plans to "green" the Vietnam’s automobile industry despite for years the Government’s support.

At the seminar "Policies on eco-friendly car development" held by the National Assembly's Committee for Science, Technology, and Environment (NACSTE) in April, Bui Thanh Tung, Member of NACSTE said that in fact, supportive policies have been set out in the law since 2008; however, the actual number of this imported and exported vehicles are very little.

"One of the reasons is that the ministries do not have a consistent definition and interpretation of the concept of eco-friendly vehicles to set out the evaluation criteria”, said Tung.

In the recent interview, economist Vu Dinh Anh said that the argument on definition of this concept is not necessary”.

"Because green vehicles benefit to all the State, automakers and consumers, the issued supportive policies should be promptly deployed," Anh added.

For the State, green vehicles will reduce dust, greenhouse gas emissions, thereby reducing the negative impacts on the environment and the pressure on fossil resources.

For the automakers, their competitiveness will be enhanced through research and development of technology. Since then, hybrid vehicles will be more and more superior to meet the consumers’ demand for fuel-efficient cars, contributing to the social development towards sustainable development.

For customers, hybrid vehicles are fuel efficient thanks to high-tech applications with the rhythmic combination of gasoline and electricity based on the principle of minimum use of gasoline engine and reuse of excess energy.

In addition, the number of vehicles in Vietnam are currently increasing and not numerous, the Vietnam’s Government should realize preferential policies for green vehicles as soon as possible to avoid the cost of conversion and reduce waste of resources, Anh emphasized.