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.

Comments

Easy to do for Net Energy Exporting countries

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Easy to do for Net Energy Exporting countries

[mikael]

Norway is diversifying away from oil production and into renewable energies like offshore wind farms and hydroelectric power generation. The same technologies used to make oil rigs and power lines resistant to salt water corrosion can be used for offshore wind farms as well. With a population around 5 million and twice the land area of the UK, they can make fast economic changes. Plus they invested the revenue from the oil industry into a trust fund for the country.

Re:Easy to do for Net Energy Exporting countries

[Anonymous Coward]

That's all true but doesn't change the original AC's point: Norway is only able to do so because they made vast amounts of money from Oil.

Presenting them as some kind of ideal "look how great they are, they're the furthest along in the migration to EV's" without explicitly acknowledging that they can only do so because the they extracted giga-tons of carbon from their soil that is now heating up the planet is intellectually dishonest.

Posted AC to conserve the mod point I gave the original AC.

Re:Easy to do for Net Energy Exporting countries

[Pinky's Brain]

Not really an example to the world though, the countries with massive oil based trade surpluses and huge amounts of hydro-potential are Norway and Norway.

This is just Norway investing in autarky, it's not really very interesting for the rest of the world. Unless you want to emigrate to Norway, which wouldn't be a bad idea.

Re:Easy to do for Net Energy Exporting countries

[AmiMoJo]

Interesting that in Norway, a country that is sparsely populated in many parts and very cold (which reduces range) a lot of people like EVs. All the rubbish about them being unsuitable for the mass market or countries where you need to travel far or with bad weather is demonstrably wrong.

Re:Easy to do for Net Energy Exporting countries

[MightyMartian]

In other words, they managed to maintain their sovereign wealth fund, rather than blowing it like petrojurisdictions like Venezuela and Alberta did, and now can channel that money into the next generation of energy production and use. You'll note that Saudi Arabia is doing the same thing now, but on an even larger scale.

The fact that major oil producing nations like Saudi Arabia and Norway are clearly planning for a post-oil future ought to tell you something.

Re: Easy to do for Net Energy Exporting countries

[mspohr]

Right. Good on them.
Why aren't other oil rich countries doing the same?
Why doesn't the US do the same?
They seem to be smarter and less corrupt than others.

well, OK

[cascadingstylesheet]

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.

Re:well, OK

[Rei]

It's anything but "pays you to own one". It's just that ICE vehicles are super-expensive, while EVs are just "normal priced". The other incentives, like parking, don't amass to that much money on average, and there's no tax deduction or rebate or anything like that (like the US's deduction).

On one hand, the government misses out on all of those sales taxes for EVs. On the other hand, I'm sure that a lot of people were buying a car specifically because they could afford an EV and wouldn't have purchased a vehicle otherwise.

Probably the biggest reason Norway is in front is that their per-capita incomes are so high - they spend more on vehicles, period, and EVs compete far better on the high end than the low end (although that inflection point keeps dropping). Aka, adding more electric motor power is a lot cheaper than adding more gasoline power, but batteries are a relatively fixed cost. In Iceland, our incentives aren't much different from Norway's, but we're only up to 20% adoption rates (that said, part of that is also due to how terrible our EV infrastructure is; Norway's is awesome, and keeps getting better).

Not a free market decision

[Tulsa_Time]

"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."

Re:Not a free market decision

[DogDude]

The "free market" doesn't take into account externalities, such as pollution, so I'm glad that it's NOT a "free market" decision.

Re: Not a free market decision

[arcade]

The tax is not the same for all fossil cars. Where on earth do you have that from?

There's 3 parts of the "engangsavgift" (one time tax, paid as you buy it):

Weight:
351-1200kg: 26.51NOK/kg
1201-1400kg: 66.05NOK/kg
1401-1500kg: 206.41NOK/kg
> 1500kg: 240.06NOK/kg

CO2 (based on released grams per kilometer):
0-75g: 0NOK
76-100g: 914.7NOK/(g/km)
101-130g: 955.49NOK/(g/km)
131-200g: 2685.98NOK/(g/km)
> 200g: 3449.8NOK/(g/km)

NOX:
70.94NOK per mg/km

You add these together to find your engangsavgift.

The tax easily runs to more than 100.000USD for land rovers.

Re:Not a free market decision

[MightyMartian]

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.

Start subsidy to to eliminate hybrid cars

[jfdavis668]

Since hybrid cars still use fossil fuels, they should start subsidizing electric cars to eliminate hybrids.

Let's all remember...

[argStyopa]

...that Norway is NOT ONLY a fabulously wealthy petro-state, but far more prudent about what they do with the funds than other oil-rich countries.

Using them as an example of anything in terms of social policies is hardly exportable to most other country's circumstances.

Re: Let's all remember...

[mspohr]

Yes, most other Petro states are happy to just keep the ruling class in hookers and blow. Hard to imagine them being socially responsible.

Re:Why Norway is Rich

[svendsen]

That would be true if the share of the cost and the amount of military resources provided were equal. Which is not the case.

The US pays the largest part of the NATO budget (source: CNSNEWS) and supplies the largest amount of troops, tanks, planes, etc. (source: wikipedia).

So yes Norway's defense is basically externalized.

This is great for everyone...

[tomxor]

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.

Re:So, what fraction of Norway's cars are EV/Hybri

[hipp5]

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.