Summary
Norway is on track to become the first country to eliminate gasoline and diesel cars from new car sales, with EVs making up over 96% of recent purchases.
Decades of incentives, including tax breaks and infrastructure investments, have driven this shift.
Officials see EV adoption as a “new normal” and aim for electric city buses by 2025.
While other countries lag behind, Norway’s success demonstrates the potential for widespread EV adoption.
Basically, if your government really wants it and doesn’t give in to lobbying then they can do it.
It’s many years of concerted effort with successive administrations keeping up the commitment.
Our 2024 figure for % of new cars being electric was 19.6% in the UK so I’d be very surprised if we hit the 2030 target of 80% new cars sold being zero emission.
Geology and geography are also helping a lot.
They don’t withdraw much from that fund though and have an annual ceiling of 3% of its value, they still pay a good amount of taxes (22% on income, 25% sales tax). Blaming the oil fund just shows how lacking other countries management is.
They don’t withdraw a lot, but having it means they don’t have a need to tax all the things just in case either and they can take a hit today to plan for a better future. That is to say, EVs in Norway are exempt from vehicle taxes, import duties, registration fees and get all kinds of other benefits too making them way cheaper in comparison to ICE cars.
That fund has something like $200 000 per Norwegian in it.
Most things have a 25% sales tax on them + 22% flat rate for income tax. How much taxes are billionaires paying in the US?
Again, blame the fund all you want, in the end the problem is other countries not jumping at the opportunities presented to them to build a similar fund.
It was inspired by Alberta’s heritage fund (which obviously existed before Norway’s), Alberta has a much bigger oil reserve and has extracted way more oil than Norway. How much do they have in their version of the fund? Less than CAD $30B. Instead of investing for the future they decided to cut all sales taxes and to lower income taxes as much as they realistically could while still offering public services.
The same logic can apply to any government that has natural resources to manage and decides not to nationalize it to invest for the future.
No clue, I’m from Finland where our VAT is 25.5%, income tax is higher than in Norway, and our vehicles are some of the most expensive, and also the oldest, in Europe :)
Close.
Every NOK over 500k is now with VAT. They changed it last year.
The selection under 500k is still quite good, so I’m not gonna pretend the deal is horrible, and you only pay on the amount over, so a 600k car is still artificially cheap compared to most places.
Yepp, it’s odd to celebrate the milestone to emobility if one knows it’s paid all by carving carbon out of the earth. The goal of Emobility is to reduce carbon emissions - as far as I know.
A nation converting nearly 100% to EV means less carbon needing to be carved out of the Earth going forward. How is that not something to celebrate for those that like less carbon being carved out of the Earth?
Because this very nation makes tons of money by selling oil and gaz (carbon emissions)
Same joke if Saudi Arabia would go 100% emobility and keeps selling oil (carbon emissions)
Are you saying you would prefer they sell tons oil and gas (carbon emissions), as well as have their nation producing even more carbon emissions from ICE vehicle tailpipes? That seems to contradict your desire to have fewer carbon emissions.
I’m not saying they aren’t downplaying it, but it’s also a population of 5.5 million of highly educated and high per capita income, which makes easier to implement. Small population and people who can afford it.
Maybe but so far in the us, it’s not the large population or lack of affordability blocking EV adoption, as much as politics, conservative backlash, Facebook science, outrage culture. If we could put aside our toxicity, spite, narcissism, and come together for a better future, we could be pretty far down that road too
Certainly valid that there isn’t a cultural norm for it in the US. With that said, the US still has about 3.3 million EVs on the road. Norway has about 3.4 million cars on the road total.
So it’s a heck of a lot easier to enable 5.5 million people to replace their cars then 330 million people. Size matters as much as the identity we have with it on this one.
That works both ways. Norway doesn’t have a large base of car manufacturers who can follow their guidance, but the US does, including Tesla who did so much to popularize EVs and used to dominate
Any large transition need guidance, incentives, motivation to happen in a reasonable time. Norway did that. Meanwhile the us is an inconsistent mess spewing FUD, lobbying by entrenched interests, and very short term thinking. Of course we only have the early adopters who could wade through all that resistance and now with Musks jump to the right we have a whole new obstacle.
And this is the nuanced answer that begins to give context to the issue.
Absolutely correct.
Sure, but Norway also has decent active/public transit. So, if residents can’t afford an EV, there’s a good chance they just don’t own a car at all, and can still get around okay.
As I’m here now, I can attest to the great public transit. However I will also say the large and dispirit nature of their population means the car will still likely rule. Yes many may not afford it, and some prefer the bike (even now in winter) but they seem to love their cars as much as the US given the traffic.