Would you like fries with that?

Hope­fully I’m wrong, but I get the feel­ing that the cur­rent regime to encour­age the use of less harm­ful fuels either isn’t work­ing, or doesn’t exist at all. Just look at the num­ber of CNG refu­el­ing sta­tions on the island. The NEA’s job seems to be to just “hope to cre­ate the crit­i­cal mass of CNG vehi­cles needed for the CNG refu­el­ing infra­struc­ture to be put in place early.”

There is also this thing called the GVR (Green Vehi­cle Rebate) which adds to the com­plex­ity that is the rocket sci­ence of vehi­cle pur­chasing.

Accord­ing to my under­stand­ing, if not for the good peo­ple at the car deal­ers’ who’ll do the math for you, you’d have to whip out your cal­cu­la­tor when you want to buy a car that is worth, say $10,000 and has an engine capac­ity of 1.6L:

So you pay:

$10,000 for the car

plus

COE of say $15,000 depend­ing on the mys­te­ri­ous “open” bid­ding system,

subto­tal so far: $25,000

plus

ARF (Addi­tional Reg­is­tra­tion Fee) (110% x 10,000) = $11,100

subto­tal so far: $36,100

plus

RF (Reg­is­tra­tion Fee) = $140

subto­tal so far: $36,240

plus

Excise Duty (20% x 10,000) = $2,000

subto­tal so far: $38,240

Got that so far? OK, now, we’re not going to add on road costs like road tax and insur­ance yet. But say for instance, you wanted to save the earth, and your car is an electric-petrol hybrid, and we know that elec­tric hybrids are roughly 8 to 10% more expen­sive than their con­ven­tional coun­ter­parts. So that makes your car worth say, $11,000.

The LTA gives you a whop­ping dis­count of 40% off your car’s orig­i­nal value, or OMV, which you can use to off­set the ARF payable.

So, if your baby is a green car:

$11,000 + 15,000 + 140 + (12,100 — 4,400 = 7,700) + 2,200 = $36,040.

Hmmm… $2,200 cheaper than a petrol car. Think I’ll go save the earth and buy a hybrid. Oh wait, that’s only less than 6% cheaper. WTF?! I get bet­ter deals at the Great Sin­ga­pore Sale!

A big, big dis­claimer here though — as my teach­ers would attest, my math could very likely be wrong, and I could have mis­led myself into think­ing that it’s not worth the trou­ble get­ting a hybrid car and sav­ing the earth. So, please, if you could cor­rect me, let me know. Leave your work­ings and answers in the com­ments box.

Or if you pre­fer, work out a scheme where you get dis­counted meals at McDonald’s because you’ve used their used cook­ing oil as fuel.