Norway is on track to be the first all-electric vehicle country. Last year, 88.9 percent of all new cars sold were EVs, according to the BBC. These stats are a far cry from the U.S., where only 8 percent of car sales were EVs in 2024, as reported by Reuters.
"We think it's wrong to advise a customer coming in here today to buy an [internal combustion engine] car because the future is electric," the chief executive of an Oslo-based car dealership Harald A Møller, Ulf Tore, told the BBC. "Long-range, high-charging speed. It's hard to go back."
Norway's success came from a sustained focus to uplift the EV industry spanning back to the 1990s when they began taxing diesel engine cars, making them more expensive to purchase. Contrastingly, Norway exempted EVs from taxes.
Then, in 2017 the country set a "non-binding goal" to have all cars sold be electric by some point in 2025 — a goal now on the horizon.
The country still sells internal combustion engine cars, but few are choosing to buy them.
Perks like tax breaks, free parking, discounted road tolls, and access to the bus lane, along with EV perks like saving money on gas, have made Norwegians only want to buy EVs.
One Norwegian EV owner, Ståle Fyen, told the BBC: "With all the incentives we have in Norway, with no taxes on EVs, that was quite important to us money-wise."
Another, Christina Bu, nodded to a hopeful future where more countries adopt Norwegian policies. She said that other countries can easily copy Norway and that they are not more environmentally minded than other populations in the world.
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