In 2024, 88.9 per cent of all new passenger cars sold in Norway were fully electric, according to the Norwegian EV Association.Supplied
If the Canadian government wants to know what a successful strategy for growing the electric-vehicle industry might look like, it could do worse than visiting Norway.
In 2017, the Norwegian Parliament set a goal of having all new car sales be zero-emission by 2025. This was not a mandate that came with penalties; there were no fines to be doled out to manufacturers that didn’t meet certain quotas. It was done with both carrots and sticks.
The overarching philosophy adopted by successive governments over the past few decades – crucially, there has been no serious ideological divide between Norwegian political parties over efforts to reduce transportation-sector emissions – has been this: it should always be more economical to choose an EV over a gas-powered vehicle. To that end, they effectively adopted a “polluter pays” principle.
Norwegian governments raised taxes on gasoline, making it less costly to drive an EV. The taxes on polluting cars partially paid for the inducements offered to EV drivers. The purchase tax on cars with emissions, for instance, is calculated by weight and carbon-dioxide and nitrous-oxide emissions, making cars with high discharges extremely expensive.
For the longest time, EVs were exempt from the national value-added tax (VAT), as well from an onerous purchase tax on new cars. That has changed recently; now, the VAT exemption on new EVs applies only to the first 500,000 kroner – or around $67,000.
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EV owners also got breaks on road tolls – in some cases, not having to pay them entirely. They didn’t have to pay for ferries. They got free municipal parking. They could travel in bus lanes. Most of these incentives were put in place in the early years – the country’s EV history dates back to the early 1990s – of trying to persuade the public of the merits of going electric. (Many of them have since ended or been modified.)
The government also passed a law in 2017 that people living in apartment buildings had the right to be able to charge their EVs – making outfitting many of these places with charging infrastructure a minor industry. That charging infrastructure, which is one of the big impediments to EV uptake in Canada and elsewhere, became a singular focus of the Norwegian government, says Christina Bu, secretary general of the Norwegian EV Association. In 2022, the government launched a national charging strategy with a goal of having no more than 50 kilometres between stations on all major roadways.
“In June, we reached over 10,000 fast chargers in Norway,” Ms. Bu told me. “This means we are ahead of our original goal. The success is largely due to the fact that the charging stations have mostly been privately financed by charging companies.”
So, how successful has the Norwegian EV strategy been?
Last year, according to the EV Association, 88.9 per cent of all new passenger cars sold in the country were fully electric. And more than 27 per cent of registered cars on the road were zero-emission. So there is a strong likelihood Norway will get close to meeting its goal of having all sales of new cars in the country be EVs by the end of this year. (Admittedly, it will take a while for all gas-powered vehicles to be off the road.)
Meanwhile, it makes you despair, if you care about such things, to look at what’s happening in Canada, where EV sales have either stalled or plunged. In the first quarter of this year, according to Statistics Canada, only 8.7 per cent of new cars purchased were EVs. Last year, EVs represented 17 per cent of all new cars sold in this country, up from 13 per cent in 2023. However, most of those 2024 sales – 92 per cent – occurred in the provinces of Quebec, Ontario and B.C.
The country where 76 per cent of cars sold are electric
We have failed to put enough incentives in front of car buyers to go electric, and failed to convince them there is enough infrastructure in place to traverse the country free of fear of running out of power.
Under the federal government’s current EV mandate, hybrids and zero-emission vehicles need to make up 20 per cent of all car sales in 2026 – with that percentage growing gradually until 2035, when fully 100 per cent of all new registered cars must be electric or hybrid. B.C.’s EV mandate is even more onerous.
But there is no chance that Ottawa realizes its goal next year. It should hit pause on its mandate program until it has time to fully re-evaluate how to successfully reboot its EV initiative. A good place to start would be looking at what Norway did to crack the EV code.
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