Despite the fact that Norway is an oil-producing country, its citizens are in love with electric cars. How can we say that? That’s simple; of all the new cars that have been sold in the country during the first six months of 2019, almost half were electric. This is based on data that has been released by the Norwegian Road Federation.
48.4% of the vehicles sold during the first half of the year were powered by a fully electric engine. This is an increase from 31.2% for all of 2018. Thanks to the increase in electric vehicle sales, Norway has taken the role of leader across the globe. The country has a goal of curbing sales of diesel and petrol engines by 2025.
It has already put policies in place that are aimed at rewarding vehicles that don’t rely on greenhouse emitting fuel for powering vehicles. The government even offers exemptions to the car owners whose cars are battery-driven so that they don’t have to pay heavy taxes that the owners of fossil fuel-powered cars have to pay.
As per the data from the International Energy Agency (IEA), Norway electric car market share was at 39% in 2017, whereas Iceland was in second place with 12%, and Sweden had the third spot with 6% share. The incentivization offered by Norway means good business for Tesla that claims that it sold 3,755 vehicles in Norway only during the second quarter. This accounts for 24.5% of the electric cars sold in the country during the quarter.
During the second quarter, Tesla has delivered a total of 95,200 vehicles as opposed to the 88,000 deliveries that Wall Street was looking for and thus Tesla said while announcing the results, ‘Orders generated during the quarter exceeded our deliveries; thus we are entering Q3 with an increase in our order backlog. We believe we are well-positioned to continue growing total production and deliveries in Q3.’
