Electric cars make up 43 percent of all cars in Baerum, with resident Baard Gundersen making the switch in 2016.
Now on his second fully electric car, the CEO of a coffee company described his decision as a “no-brainer”.
“It was much cheaper to buy a car like this than a traditional car, almost half price,” he said at the wheel of his BMW iX SUV.
Despite being a major oil and gas producer, Norway has adopted the most ambitious electric vehicle (EV) objective in the world: only zero-emission private new cars will be sold from next year.
While not a European Union member, Norway would beat the bloc’s deadline to phase out the sale of fossil fuel-burning cars by 2035 by a decade.
Driven by the popularity of Teslas, electric cars accounted for a staggering 96.4 percent of new car registrations in Norway in September, vastly outpacing the European average of 17.3 percent.
Norway has come a long way since 2012, when EVs only made up 2.8 percent of the market.
The boom has much to do with proactive policy.
At the turn of the century, authorities exempted electric cars from certain taxes.
Norway had never had its own carmaker, and the hope was that the policies would create fertile ground for a homegrown EV champion.
It turned out to be in vain, as Norway’s Pivco electric car maker — later renamed Think and for a while owned by Ford — went bankrupt in 2011.
But the tax exemptions remained — even if some have been rolled back in recent years — making all-electric cars competitively priced compared to those with combustion engines, which are heavily taxed.
“We have used the stick for fossil vehicles and the carrot for electric cars,” Cecilie Knibe Kroglund, state secretary at Norway’s transport ministry, told AFP.
“It’s possible that other countries will have to use other types of incentives depending on usage, their geography and the way public transport works. But as far as we are concerned, our incentives have worked very well,” she said.
Electric cars have also long benefited from other special privileges, like exemptions from city tolls and free parking in public car parks.
This was prompted by a civil disobedience campaign in the 1990s by environmental activist Frederic Hauge, co-founder of the NGO Bellona, and Morten Harket, the singer of iconic Norwegian pop group A-ha — famous for the hit “Take On Me”.
Travelling around in a small Fiat Panda — converted to be electric — the two men stubbornly racked up a mountain of fines which they refused to pay in an effort to promote zero-emission vehicles.
Their trusty car was finally seized, but a few years later authorities ended up granting electric vehicles, which were still rare at the time, the special privileges.
“I didn’t feel like I was entering into the role of a rebel really,” Harket told the BBC in 2022.
