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Norway Powers Ahead (Electrically): Over Half New Car Sales Now Electric or Hybrid (reuters.com)
Sales of electric and hybrid cars rose above half of new registrations in Norway in 2017, a record aided by generous subsidies that extended the country's lead in shifting from fossil-fuel engines, data showed on Wednesday. From a report: Pure electric cars and hybrids, which have both battery power and a diesel or petrol motor, accounted for 52 percent of all new car sales last year in Norway against 40 percent in 2016, the independent Norwegian Road Federation (OFV) said. "No one else is close" in terms of a national share of electric cars, OFV chief Oeyvind Solberg Thorsen said. "For the first time we have a fossil-fuel market share below 50 percent." Norway exempts new electric cars from almost all taxes and grants perks that can be worth thousands of dollars a year in terms of free or subsidized parking, re-charging and use of toll roads, ferries and tunnels.
When your economy is based on extraction of fossil fuels, it's easy to put out public stories about your progressive energy policies and socialist government and laugh all the way to the bank as the checks from the oil wells are deposited.
Norway exempts new electric cars from almost all taxes and grants perks that can be worth thousands of dollars a year in terms of free or subsidized parking, re-charging and use of toll roads, ferries and tunnels.
Well, OK ... if you basically paid me to own one, I'd probably have one too.
The "free market" doesn't take into account externalities, such as pollution, so I'm glad that it's NOT a "free market" decision.
I don't respond to AC's.
And how would pollution be accounted for, particularly when in most environments it actually takes time for pollutants to build up to a level where they start a problem? To my mind, a keen capitalist in such a "free market" would busy himself maximizing profits by ignoring pollution, and then walk away once the extent of the damage he had done became evident. And low and behold, that's often what has happened:
Sydney Tar Ponds
The coal and rust belts throughout the industrialized world are filled with these sort of toxic dumps, and guess who is on the hook in most cases for cleaning them up. That's right; the taxpayers within those jurisdictions.
In fact, that's not even the limit of how evil industries can be. The sugar and tobacco industries not only sold products highly dangerous to human health, but used junk science to hide the fact that they were killing people... for decades. And who was left responsible for decades worth of cancers, heart disease, diabetes, and so forth? That's right, the taxpayer (or in the US, in many cases, those who paid health insurance premiums). These companies became some of the most successful companies in the world, raking in vast profits, and letting governments and insurance companies deal with the carnage they were producing.
Sorry mate, your free market is an utter fantasy, a religion as daft as $cientology. Free markets cannot be unconstrained, and there must be regulation in place, because its government's job to look out for the people. I'm all onboard for capitalism and free enterprise, but the idea that some guy who makes thousands of times my hourly wage gives one single fuck about my wellbeing or that somehow he'll feel the need to moderate his company's actions for my best interests is, well, just plain absurd.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I don't care about the "free market" or "net energy exporter" arguments, the important thing is that Norway has contributed substantially to electric car sales... This in turn will help accelerate technological improvements and drive cost down through mass production. That is the key catalyst that is needed to make turn a "viable technology" into a widely available and affordable technology.
Well you're never going to get to a significant fraction of the cars on the road being EV without a significant fraction of sales being EV. Usable EVs have only been around for a couple of years. Even if 100% of sales had been EV from the day they were released, it would be a while before they represented the majority of cars on the road.
But what this news does suggest is that we're starting to enter the era of runaway EV adoption, and I imagine my 2-year-old daughter will never drive an ICE (if she even drives a car at all).
There is also some speculation that--despite the usual "lifespan" of an ICE car--the transition could actually happen much faster than most people expect. That's because once a critical mass of cars are EV, you lose the infrastructure (gas stations, engine shops) that support ICE cars, driving ever more rapid adoption of EVs. It happened with the conversion of cameras from film to digital. People who bought expensive film cameras and planned to keep them for a decade or more quickly changed their tune once the critical mass of digital was reached and all the film developers started shutting down.