Starting in January 2012
The prime minister of Québec, Jean Charest, has unveiled his incentive plan for electric vehicles yesterday. Rebates of up to C$8000 will be offered on a sliding scale, with the biggest ones offered to the EVs with the biggest range, and smaller incentives will go to EVs and plug-in hybrids with smaller batteries. The government will also work on charging infrastructure and encourage mass-transit systems to also electrify their operations.

R1E electric car. Photo: Subaru

The provincial government aims for 300,000 electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles on the roads of the province by 2020, or 25% of the cars sold there. This should reduce CO2 emissions by around 900,000 tons. The rebate program will start on January 2012, and it has a financing of $50 million until 2016.

But I think these incentives should definitely be combined with more incentives and infrastructure investments for mass-transit and biking.

Technical Challenges
Electric cars in Québec make relatively good environmental sense because around 93% of the 33GW+ of electricity that are produced there come from hydro, but there are also big technical challenges to their adoption, such as the very cold winters that can significantly reduce the electric driving range (heaters use lots of power, and batteries tend to be affected negatively by cold weather).

Via Radio-Canada (French)