If taxes in Italy are too high, it is better not to know how much you pay in this country to keep the most “popular” vehicle of all: the car. Solution to pollution? Bad policy? To you the arduous sentence.
Despite the expensive gasoline, the price of electric cars and the European regulations, owning a car at least in this historical period is not an unsustainable cost for a person with a job that pays decently. Throwing itself into the second-hand market and choking all costs, with just over a thousand euros you can put on something with four wheels and able to go from point A to point B without falling apart in the garage.
But not all countries in the world are the same. A while ago we saw several interesting rankings, from the nations that have taken the ecological transition more seriously and have the most electric cars to the one that shows the nations with the least cars. Probably, in the latter Singapore will be back in a few years.
A growing power not only in Asia but globally, the small state of Singapore which has about 5 million inhabitants – practically two Italian metropolises put together – has a real anti-car system. Having a car in this state is impossible for non-millionaires. But why ever Has the government taken this path?
A luxury item
Taxes in Singapore have effectively turned time back to 1900, when cars were luxury goods that only a lucky few could afford. The system leaves you no way out: to have a car legally you need the COE or Certificate of Entitlement. This document allows you to buy a car: without it, you are breaking the law by just driving a vehicle.
The problem is the way in which COEs are released i.e. through government auctions held twice a month. According to various sources, the price at which these certificates were sold ranges from $ 10,000 for mopeds to the $ 53,000 required for means of transport. up to almost 100,000 Dollars for a normal car, obviously exercising an average between the last auctions carried out. That’s not all: the COE has a duration of only ten years!
You will realize for yourself that buying a car after having already spent between 50,000 and 100,000 dollars just for a document that allows you to take it on the street is an expense that many people, even wealthy people, cannot face lightly. Not surprisingly, in Singapore almost all of them travel by public transport and only the richest can afford a car.
This system was studied in the 1990s to reduce a huge problem, the traffic that plagued the small town. Of course, road congestion is just a memory. But is it really right to ban the poor from driving a car? In the end, reducing to a minimum, this is precisely the effect of this law …
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