Despite being one of the largest countries in Europe and with the economy that managed to escape recent financial turmoils relatively unscathed, Poland is lagging behind when it comes to electric vehicles or curbing pollution.

Early in 2017, the government has laid down the plans to change it. Named Electromobility Development Plan. Part of the plan assumes that by 2025 there will be 1 million electric vehicles on the roads (today there’s approximately 26,5 million cars registered), which should help to eliminate at least some of the smog in the busy cities.

The other incentives will include:

• No excise duties for EVs and no property tax for the households equipped with a charging station,
• supporting and building charging infrastructure (something that is terribly lacking today, there were only few hundreds of those by end of 2016 in the whole country),
• replacing the gas-guzzling buses with electric ones,
• establishment of Zero Emission zones.

Some developments are already on the way. ElectroMobility Poland is supporting an initiative to design an in-house EV (some of the winning concepts are shown here). Some of the cities are working on electrifying their bus fleet. Polish manufacturer Solaris already has an electric bus in their offering.

It is all for a good cause. I think the next logical step would be to focus on renewable energy sources such as wind and solar, as majority of country’s electricity comes from burning coal.

It’s never too late and this is definitely a step in the right direction!