Norway’s EV Miracle

September saw plugin electric vehicle sales in Norway hit a record-breaking 91.5%, with full electrics taking 77.5% of the total share. Projections are that it will become the first country in the world where all vehicles sold are electric early next year, three years ahead of the government’s 2025 target.

The figure is based on the total of so-called PEVs, Plug-in Electric Vehicles, which is the sum of BEVs, or Battery Electric Vehicles, and PHEVs, Plug-in Hybrid Vehicles, leaving out conventional hybrids that do not plug in and offer, in practice, virtually no benefit in terms of emissions.

For those of us who follow the evolution of the automotive market, the succession of news coming out of Norway has been fascinating and rapid: in March 2019, for the first time, sales of electric vehicles exceeded diesel and petrol vehicles, making up almost 60%. Two years later, in March 2021, the 85% milestone was passed. In August 2021, it was almost 88%, and last month, above 90%. Sales of gasoline and diesel vehicles are now a mere 5.3%, and falling, as should be the case with a technology that, in addition to being extremely harmful, is manifestly obsolete.

How did Norway achieve this miracle? Basically, by committing to it. There are tax breaks for buying electric and the government has subsidized the construction of public and private charging infrastructure. Furthermore, EV drivers are also exempt from many urban parking and highway lane restrictions, and get discounted rates on toll roads, car ferries and parking lots. And since the country gets almost all of its electricity from hydroelectric power plants, we are talking about genuinely clean energy. Now, the country’s election scene awaits the arrival of a new Labor government that has promised to levy a luxury tax on electric vehicles above a certain price, but even so, there are many brands now competing for a share of this attractive market, and the current leader, the Tesla Model Y, still falls below the proposed threshold.

But Norway is still very much an outlier: in Europe, EV sales are around 20%, but have finally overtaken diesel vehicles. In the United States, the Biden administration’s plans call for half of all vehicles sold to be electric by 2030. Perhaps a pandemic resulting from a respiratory disease is a good time to take a cue from Norway’s strong commitment (a country where the climate would not, in principle, favor the use of electric vehicles due to the relatively lower efficiency of batteries in cold climates), especially now that we can see for ourselves that government intervention, when done well, works.

The future is electric. But in Norway, the future has already arrived.

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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.

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