The government is backpedaling in its push to boost the nation’s electric vehicle market as it reduces benefits to EV buyers, including in state subsidies, experts claimed.

The nation’s green vehicles -- electric, hybrid and plug-in hybrid cars -- registered from January to April this year stood at 15,000 units, about a 3 percent share of the total new cars of 480,000 units. This indicates that the government’s goal of replacing 30 percent of new cars with green vehicles by 2020 will be hard to achieve.

Experts said the reduction of state subsidies, among other reasons, is leading consumers to hesitate on buying green cars.

“While the Korean electric vehicle market has a long way to go, the latest cut in subsidies further poured cold water on the market still at a nascent stage,” Sunwoo Myung-ho, a professor of Hanyang University’s department of automotive engineering and chairman of the Electric Vehicle Association of Asia-Pacific, told The Korea Herald.

This year, the government slashed the volume of subsidies for electric car purchases by 20 percent from 15 million won ($12,800) to 12 million won. The financial support for installing an EV charger was also cut from 6 million won to 4 million won.

Furthermore, public quick chargers became no longer free-of-charge from April. Drivers now have to pay 313 won per kilowatt-hour.

“The shift to paid charging has made consumers no longer view the high-priced electric cars as economical,” Sunwoo said.

The lack of charging stations is another factor hindering consumers from buying the green cars.

“EV owners need to get permission from the representatives of their apartment buildings when they try to install chargers at the residential areas. We found more than 60 percent failed to get this approval,” said Yoon Dong-hoon, a strategic team manager of Renault Samsung’s electric car sales.

“There seems no social consensus that residents should make way for EV drivers. In order to boost the industry, it is necessary that EV parking spaces should be allocated under the law, like spaces for the disabled,” Yoon said.

Apart from the lack of subsidies and charging stations, the government should also be more generous in classifying green vehicles, market watchers said.

Renault Samsung’s compact two-seater electric vehicle Twizy, which sold around 20,000 units in Europe and Japan, took more than one year to gain approval to hit the roads in Korea. It took longer here as the government could not decide whether to classify it as a four-wheeled or two-wheeled car.

The compact cars -- which are able to travel up to 100 kilometers on a single charge -- are expected to gain no electric car subsidies because they are to be classified as two-wheeled cars. 

GM Korea’s Volt will also be in a similar situation as it is classified as a plug-in hybrid car instead of EV because it has an engine with gasoline. However, GM has said the gasoline is only used to produce electricity and not for the power unit itself. 

By Shin Ji-hye (shinjh@heraldcorp.com)