The independent Norwegian Road Federation announced that 31.2 percent of all car sales in 2018 were electric.
Norway have set a world record for electric car sales in 2018 which is incredibly exciting. The independent Norwegian Road Federation announced that 31.2 percent of all car sales in 2018 were electric, an increase from 20.8 percent just in 2017 and 5.5 percent in 2013, which is amazing in just a few years. They’re very slowly being adopted in increasing numbers in America but in Norway, significantly faster acceptance for a couple of different reasons.
Sales of gasoline and diesel cars apparently plummeted in conjunction with new benefits that Norway set up for electric car owners like; tax exempt status, free parking and charging stations. You do get that in some places in America, if you were lucky enough to live in a lot of major cities then you might have access to like the carpool lane. You might have electric car parking spots with chargers in things like malls, at the beach, that’s all stuff we have in L.A., unfortunately in large parts of the country there aren’t benefits like that let alone benefits.
There aren’t many charging stations which is a significant problem so a country like Norway which has more centralized population areas. We have far larger total amount of area, and far less people can theoretically spool that sort of thing up faster, but we can learn something from this. We should not be dialing back our electric tax benefits the way that we are. I just saw that GM and Tesla have now reached their cap on sort of the benefit of how many cars they can sell and get those tax incentives for their customers. We need to expand that obviously not only so that we can hopefully catch up to Norway or we will fall further behind this.
A record that was set by Norway is great, I would love to see the United States succeeded at some point in the near future. We certainly need that!
