Norway on track to become the world’s first country to achieve 100% electric car sales from 2022

From the spring of 2022, all new car sales in Norway could well be electric, whether 100% electric or plug-in hybrid models. This would make the Scandinavian country the world’s very first to switch completely to a new, fully electric era.

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Norwegians have long had the necessary infrastructure for driving electric cars.

According to an analysis of sales figures from recent years, published by the Norwegian Automobile Federation (NAF), the very last sale of a new combustion-powered car, whether gasoline or diesel, is expected to take place in April 2022. The government had originally set 2025 as the target date for the complete end of new gasoline and diesel car sales, but Norwegians have evidently been much more responsive, faced with an increasingly wide and efficient selection of alternatives.

In the first nine months of 2021, the combined sales of gasoline and diesel vehicles fell below 10% of the market share. The top 15 new car sales in Norway today are almost exclusively electric vehicles, with the exception of one model… a plug-in hybrid. For the record, the best-selling conventional internal combustion engine car in Norway in 2021 is currently the Volkswagen Tiguan, which only appears in 38th place.

Of course, the used car trade will not make the market for internal combustion engine cars disappear overnight. In fact, these cars still represent nearly 85% of the cars on the road in the whole country.

The fact that Norway is set to become the first country to sell only electric models is hardly a surprise. The country has always favored the development of electric cars, notably by very quickly introducing a tax incentive for buying “clean” cars and by developing major charging infrastructure.

Although less marked, the trend is broadly echoed elsewhere, especially since the majority of car manufacturers have announced that they will move entirely to electric vehicles by 2035 or 2040 at the latest.

David Bénard