Norway tops the world for Electric Cars

 In the few years that we have been writing this Blog, this is the first time that we are writing a story on Norway. The relatively lowly populated Scandinavian nation - more famous for Vikings, smoked salmon, the most expensive alcoholic drinks in the world (so we've heard) as well as an abundance of oil and gas - is still leading the way in electric vehicle (EV) sales, at least as a percentage of all new car sales, according to industry analysts IHS Automotive. One in three new cars sold in the oil-rich Nordic nation was an EV in the first quarter of the year, and Volkswagen's e-Golf was the best seller.

In terms of new car registration, EVs made up fewer than one percent of all new cars registered in the United States of Americaland over the same time frame, but that did lead to a total of almost 15,000 of them, making it the largest market in terms of overall numbers. China was runner-up, with 12,550. IHS' data shows the wisdom of Tesla's EV strategy, too. In the US, Model S sales in Q1 outstripped every other EV. While the report doesn't give us an actual number of Tesla Model S vehicles sold in the US, we think we will go with the figure from Tesla themselves and thus it must have been at least 4,086, since Nissan sold 4,085 Leafs (or should that read Leaves?) over the same period.

IHS attributes strong sales in Norway, the Netherlands, China, and the US to powerful incentives and the obvious desire to wear hemp trousers. Within the US, EV sales are heavily skewed toward states like California and Georgia that offer large local incentives on top of federal EV tax credits. The analysts also point to a lack of good incentives for Germany's poor showing on the league table, although they note that France did equally poorly, even though that country does incentivize EV purchases.

In some ways it is a bit of a paradox; normally in oil-rich countries, the price of petrol at the pump is low and the fuel economy of the vehicles plying the streets is an irrelevance. Not so in Norway. Well done, Chaps.