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In Norway, There Is 1 All‑Electric Vehicle per 10 People

If the same applied to the United States, there would be over thirty million electric cars and light trucks on U.S. roads. Obviously the U.S. is not there yet.

A Tesla Model S in Norway. Photo: Mario Duran-Ortiz

Let’s be accurate: 1 vehicle per 10 people is the best approximation of the prevalence of all-electric light vehicles in Norway, if you want to express it in the form of 1 vehicle per [integer number] of people.

One per ten is the best approximation. Not one per nine, not one per eleven.

The exact point at which the number of such vehicles exceeds 1/10 of the population has not been passed yet — but it’s close.

You hear phrases like “Norway leads the world in EV adoption”, but that’s an understatement. Right now Norway is not just leading, it is well ahead of the rest of the pack. There is no other country like this in the world. Iceland might be the second best (might be — I didn’t check), but compared to Norway, it has less than half as many all-electric vehicles per population.

It is a matter of money, of course. Norway has extremely high taxes on ICE cars, but none or close to none on pure electric vehicles.

Which BEVs are most popular?

Norway is a land of Teslas, right? The country that will buy as many electric cars as Tesla can ship?

Well, Teslas and electric vehicles from the Volkswagen Group are now both popular.

Tesla flooded the Norwegian market with Model 3s in 2019, but in 2020 it was the Audi e-Tron (the SUV) that was the best-selling vehicle; the Model 3 regained the first place the following year. And now, the Model Y is directly competing with the Volkswagen ID.4 and its siblings. The Model Y is topping the sales charts so far this year — but if you combine the sales of the ID.4 and it siblings together, then they are outselling Tesla’s crossover.

A Volkswagen ID.4 in Norway. Photo: Tomm W. Christiansen, motor.no

There are now more than 500,000 all-electric light vehicles in Norway, that milestone was passed this year (now we are talking about all registered vehicles, not just about those sold this year). Not bad, given that the 50,000 mark was passed only in April 2015… The most common one of them (over 70,000 vehicles) is still the good old Nissan Leaf. A nice thing about the Leaf — now well into its second generation — is how it was resistant to price increases affecting EVs over the last 1–2 years (maybe it helps that the development costs are probably long paid off). I hope Nissan — which is about to start raking profits on the new Ariya — won’t start raising prices of the Leaf now, or stop its production.

The numbers

The number of all-electric light vehicles registered in Norway reached 525,993 as of 30 June 2022. The population of Norway was 5,455,582. One all-electric light vehicle per 10.37 people.

Out of these 525,993 all-electric light vehicles, 508,565 were passenger vehicles; the rest were light commercial vehicles.

A Tesla Model S in Norway. Photo: u/VegarHenriksen on Reddit

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Sources: [1],[2],[3],[4]

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