While the data is accurate, it's a bit misleading. Tesla started Model 3 deliveries to Europe in March from pre-orders that began three years ago. We're seeing the impact of these pre-orders all coming in at once and the number of vehicles registered last month is very anomalous.
In total there were 18,375 cars registered in March compared to 11,106 in February '19 and 14,401 in March '18. If you back out the Tesla Model 3 impact (-5,300), you're left with 13,075 vehicles registered last month.
Are you saying that there's some kind of externalities at play here?
Because I can think of a few other externalities that help non-EV far more than the ones you mentioned (not taxing them for ruining our health and climate, for a start).
This all seems an overdue correction to me. But I'd go further and support non-individual transportation more, too.
None of the things mentioned in the grandparent post are externalities. An externality is a consequence of some action or some transaction for people who were not a part of it. A tax or subsidy directly affects the purchaser, and is thus not an externality.
Norway has large oil deposits. They export it and put the money in a sovereign wealth fund and use it to subsidise environmental policies. In essence this is payed by oil that someone else is burning.
Whether the taxes are just or not is irrelevant here; pretending people are buying EVs just because they like them better (which is what I get from the headline) is deceptive.
They don’t cost double. In many cases petrol cars are still cheaper than their electric counterparts in Norway. Hyundai Kona petrol, for example, is slightly cheaper than Hyundai Kona electric.
But because of their tax exempt status, the price premium for electrics is much smaller in Norway than in most other countries.
Well, if you're going to blame non-EV cars for all sorts of negative externalities, you're going to need to figure out how to credit them for the positive externalities too. That's a tall order.
Well, for one thing, anything that incentivizes the development and deployment of better batteries and power conversion technology will have massive benefits for us all. Renewable energy is more about storing power than generating it.
Why can't you electrify ambulances? They're specialized taxis, many short trips, spending a lot of time parked. Only time you need long range is for patient transfer between hospitals. Fire trucks only make short trips, and (ideally) have a tiny capacity ratio.
Ditto for construction vehicles, which rarely travel long distances, often want to be heavy for greater traction, and can have surprisingly low power output. (The Cat D5K2 weighs 20,000 pounds but only has a 105 HP engine: https://www.cat.com/en_US/products/new/equipment/dozers/smal... )
I can't speak for Norway, but in the United States it is very common for Ambulances to travel difficult roads and sometimes non-roads. They have heavy-duty engines for a reason.
How about modern society? The fact that we're even in a technological position to make EVs to begin with? It's all great to hate on cars, but the world we have today is absolutely dependent on them.
Also, keep in mind the extremely high salaries in Norway. Italy or Greece could decide to offer the same tax benefits, but still very few people would be able to afford a Tesla.
Most of the electric cars sold here are leafs and e-golfs though.
A tesla is still around 800k NOK which is a little less than twice the average annual gross salary or a quarter house (unless you live around Oslo or Stavanger).
I'm driving a toyota avensis myself, the test drive of a model s didn't give a good impression. I'm also not prepared to buy a car that expensive, even with taxes my toyota was 350k NOK. Hopefully there will be long range electric cars from some other manufacturer soon. I do have some hope for the solid battery tech that toyota is developing now.
Society's purchasing power worries me. How environmentally sustainable is it to replace all the billions of cars with electric? And then decades later, perhaps even under a decade given how fast some technologies develop, how sustainable is it to replace these electric vehicles with newer models? If people have the money, that's what they're going to do.
And specifically in regards to Norway, the country exports its oil to other countries and owns its wealth to oil, being one of the largest exporters. So while headlines on electric car adoption are nice, they really miss the big picture.
True, but Tesla is still only selling the AWD Model 3 variants in Europe right now, which start at ~$50k USD plus import duties and VAT. Even with government subsidies that’s still a really expensive car for most people. I’m expecting an even larger burst of orders once the RWD variants start shipping to Europe.
Keep in mind that in Norway, fossil cars are (and have been for a long time) taxed to high heaven.
It is not uncommon for a car too double its cost as it is being taxed upon import.
Hence, in a number of other markets a $50k Tesla 3 is competing against a $25k (or whatever) Golf.
In Norway, a $50k Tesla 3 is competing against a $50k Golf.
(The numbers are just pulled out of a hat, but they illustrate the point; Norway is a very lucrative market to sell premium electric cars in as the tax advantages relative to fossil cars make premium EVs about as expensive as run-of-the-mill fossils - and they have a few other advantages like reduced tolls, driving in bus lanes &c.
I was surprised the article didn't mention the upfront tax savings. Free parking and tolls are nice and all (and were mentioned), but I'd imagine the big incentive is the $40k-$100k upfront savings.
These incentives won’t be permanent though. Once a desired target for electric vehicles hit all the incentives will be taken away. Like they did in Denmark. Which dropped Tesla sales dramatically! https://nordic.businessinsider.com/teslas-sales-fell-a-jaw-d...
Kind of ironic for Norway to export all this petrol for cars to burn in other countries and then use some of that money to make domestic cars run on electricity.
Not really. Norway gets 80-90% of its electricity from hydro. EVs are a great way of leveraging that natural resource, hence the difference in taxation.
For all practical purposes the electricity here is 100% clean except for emissions occurring during construction. Huge concrete dams add quite a bit of CO2 to the atmosphere when curing.
But still they are able to subsidize EVs because they heavily tax the oil and make a ton of money exporting oil. If Norway wasn’t oil rich there was no way these subsidies would be economically feasible.
I don't think this has much to do with the oil wealth. These are only subsidies in the sense that there is an absence of a tax that would otherwise roughly double the cost of the car. Almost no Norwegians would normally buy a car with an $80,000 (US) base price; most Tesla buyers would normally go for something less than half of that price. So the lost tax revenues aren't proportional to the price of the car.
Norway's oil wealth mostly goes towards a massive public sector and a very comprehensive social safety net, and it doesn't enter the economy directly -- only in the shape of a 3% dividend from previously invested oil tax money.
> So the lost tax revenues aren't proportional to the price of the car.
So what? It’s still lost revenue for the government. 60% of the car sales won’t give any taxes. And they still have to maintain roads and infrastructure for all those cars.
They are able to afford because the oil industry creates lots of businesses hotels and jobs and they pay taxes on their income. Which is a huge part of Norwegian economy. Imagine the economy of Norway without oil it would not have been so rich. Probably the closest example is Denmark they already abandoned the tax benefits for EVs. Because it’s a huge part of tax revenue the government can’t simply give up.
I agree, it'd be nice of them to stop exporting oil so that other, less clue-having countries (like America), are pressured into making sane decisions for the long term.
It's probably not going to happen when America is led by a president who is making really incisive arguments against renewable energy like
> And you know, don’t worry about wind, when the wind doesn’t blow, I said, “What happens when the wind doesn’t blow?” Well, then we have a problem.
As a progressive and hip vancouverite... the part of canada that exports oil is a bit of a shithole and rather authoritarian when it comes to their dealings with the other provinces (thanks for the pipeline alberta!)
While I don't like the Alberta government, there's nothing authoritarian about them fighting for their own self-interest. Every province tries to do this. Some have more leverage than others.
And it's a beautiful province full of wonderful people, in my humble opinion. (So is B.C. I'm from Ontario, for what it's worth.)
I'd be interested how well electric cars faired in Norway as I would expect the colder months would impact the battery performance (reduce range). Which makes me wonder if manufacturers do any country adaptations for the local climate.
The temperature dropped to -40 degrees Celsius. It was so cold that the trains couldn’t operate and the diesel in the buses froze. But the Model S was just fine.
“We found out that it’s a super winter car,” says Jens. “It’s so fantastic. It’s much easier and better than an ordinary car.” He likes that you can heat the Model S remotely via an app, so that there’s no ice or snow on the car when you’re ready to drive it. He also says the winter range is almost the same as the summer range. In December, he and Røsnes took the Model S to an ice hotel in Sweden, 200km from Narvik. The temperature dropped to -40 degrees Celsius. It was so cold that the trains couldn’t operate and the diesel in the buses froze. But the Model S was just fine."
> He also says the winter range is almost the same as the summer range.
That's really interesting, and I'd be curious to know if others share this experience.
I have a plug-in hybrid (Ford CMAX) and live in the Bay Area, which has very mild winters. But even here, the range drops substantially when the temperature is "cold" (below 40° F). Then you turn on the heat, and the range drops even further. My typical experience is that the range is about -30% if it's under 40° outside, and turning on the heat knocks off another 25%.
Things may be very different in a Tesla (which obviously has a much larger battery), but presumably the same rules of physics apply?
Tesla uses a liquid coolant and active thermal management for battery conditioning. Model S and X have a dedicated battery heater, the Model 3 uses the motor and power inverter to warm the battery.
Anecdotally only (I don't have data), it appears so from Model 3 owner complaints on Tesla Forums and Reddit (it could be selection bias; Model 3 owners are more likely in my opinion to park outside or on the street than a Model S or X owner who will garage the vehicle). A recent software update attempts to mitigate the issue, but there's only so much physics you can solve with software (similar to how Tesla cheaped out on a ~$15 rain sensor and tried to use machine vision to handle automatic wipers, and it still doesn't work well).
I think he is either lying or not remembering correctly. Regenerative braking is severely impacted in winter. BUt maybe he drives mostly long distances on highways rather than in towns.
Only if you've allowed the battery to cold soak. Once warmed up, regenerative braking operates as expected (or if you plugged in overnight). Point to ICE vehicles in this regard, but only because they waste so much energy to heat.
Need to Supercharge/Fast DC charge? Do so before you park for the night while the powertrain is still warm, not in the morning.
Gasoline cars have an optional engine block heaters, which not even an expensive option that heats up engine block and oil making the car nice and toasty as soon as heater inside the car is turned on.
Engine block heater is usually connected to a timer with an alarm, that turns out about 40 minutes before you need to leave.
Tesla is a nice car, but its not like this kind of technology hasn't been used before, especially in a country with a cold climate.
In an old book about the development of the Prudhoe Bay Oil Field in Alaska, it was called Alaska Crude if memory serves, they described having to burn fires beneath the oil pans of their trucks to unseize the moving parts because the oil had frozen solid.
EVs seem obviously superior in this department, at least when it comes to cold enough temperatures to freeze engine oil.
Charcoal briquettes in a roaster pan can be useful there too, if you're ever in that situation. You get the radiative warmth without the flame (once it's burned down).
Yes, I've seen Ice Road Truckers - scary job. Also that environment would be the true test of any EV truck. Which is an area far more in its infancy compared to cars.
>It was so cold that the trains couldn’t operate and the diesel in the buses froze. But the Model S was just fine.
This doesn't seem to align with real world results from the Tesla forums, subreddit, and Twitter. Lots of complaints about reduced range and slow charging during the recent cold snap.
Whats the point of pretending that battery performance doesn't suffer in cold temperatures? Is this really up for debate with current tech?
So starting at -20C you run into trouble! Many people forget that the charging temperature range is narrower, but luckily if you are connected to a charger you could use some of that energy to run the Battery Thermal Management System.
Our older Leaf had bad range in the cold, and I think it had a heat pump.
I thought Tesla used a system to bring waste heat from the motors and battery into the cabin? Maybe that's only the S, because the 3's motor is more efficient?
Sorry for the paywall, but I was reminded of this article in the Economist about the popularity of the Toyota Prius in Mongolia. One reason is low prices, but another is that they will start in extreme cold when ICE engines can't: https://www.economist.com/asia/2018/12/22/everyone-in-mongol...
True. Range is reduced but the degradation is slower. Based on complaints it seems Nissan Leafs smaller batteries with crummy thermal management degrade fairly quickly in hot climates. But are 'fine' in mild climates.
I really want that to be true, but try having your car battery die 3 times in a single week of -44 degree celsius (-47 fahrenheit) weather. Or, less dramatically, watch your phone go from 100% charged to 5% charged in just 30 minutes in that same temperature.
I'm no physicist, but anecdotally, you are very very wrong.
UPDATE: See hwillis' comment below. I'm so very very wrong, and am ashamed of my ignorance.
It is actually true. The battery stores just as much energy when it's cold, and has higher efficiency. The problem is that that efficiency drops dramatically as you try to pull more power.
A very simplified explanation would be that the charge carriers have a harder time moving quickly through cold electrolyte. This results in a kind of drag (most of which is actually literal drag) that results in a lower voltage on the output. Your phone measures its charge via the voltage (partly), so when it starts pulling more power it suddenly registers much lower voltage. If you turned it off and let the voltage recover, it would show as charged again.
Normal lead acid batteries will fail for the same reason; they can't push amps at low temperatures. If they were heated up they would work fine and they will have lost less charge than if they had been sitting at room temperature. Electric car batteries are the same, but the cold temperature enables to push much more power for longer without getting too hot.
Please do not compare phone batteries to large, carefully controlled and well-treated batteries like those in new EVs. They are totally different animals. Phone batteries are probably the most brutal of all common battery applications; they are used as heat sinks, have zero temperature control, and regularly experience forces and temperatures that are way out of spec.
Unless they made the battery protect itself from the cold with some kind of thermal management system ? Such a system could run in external power when plugged in, and as a safety be able to run on it's own power, draining the battery of course.
The really interesting stats will come when the affordable (Standard Range) Model 3 will be available in Europe in a few months. I'm sure a lot of people in Norway are waiting for it.
The potential value is in an entire nation demonstrating it's possible to function perfectly well at a high quality of life on an electrified transportation system.
Whatever means were used to compel its citizens to cooperate with pivoting energy sources is moot. Every nation will have to figure that out for itself.
It matters how you pay for your your clean vehicles. If your money is from burning lots og oil, which is partially the case here, you may not eventually be saving any CO2 from the atmosphere. Which is the whole point of electric vehicles. I would love to see some numbers on these things.
There is no realistic scenario where all the remaining oil stays in the ground.
The best practical case is that it gets applied towards transitioning to renewables ASAP.
What seems more likely right now is that most of it gets burned gratuitously on Business As Usual; frivolously flying around the planet and driving archaic gas-guzzling machines without even preparing ourselves for when it runs out.
Actually stopping CO2 emissions and not burning most of the remaining oil is a ridiculous fantasy.
EVs being popular in Norway is interesting for a couple of reasons mainly because they counter popular arguments against EV .
1) Lots of people are worried about EV performance in cold weather. Well, if you can drive an EV in Narvik (well within the polar circle), that means this is pretty much a solved problem. I don't think many people realize just how dangerous can be to operate a vehicle in arctic temperatures in a remote area where the weather can kill you in no time at all. E.g. heating your car is not optional when it is minus 40 and you have to be prepared for the car breaking down. The cold can kill you in no time at all if you get stuck in the middle of nowhere. Yet, EVs are both common and popular across Norway (not just the south). That means Norwegians consider them safe and practical enough to drive around some of the harshest places in the world.
2) Range anxiety in a huge, sparsely populated country with a harsh climate like Norway is ... not a thing. There are charging points all over the place. Better still, in much of the country it is common to plugin petrol cars as well to keep them warm. This is not optional when temperatures regularly drop well below the point where the car would even start. If you are plugging the car in anyway, you might as well charge the car. And of course electricity is dirt cheap in Norway because they have hydro-power.
There are of course many other reasons why EVs in Norway (and elsewhere) are interesting. But I thought these were worth highlighting.
Electric cars are a lot of fun to drive, but ultimately I think the incentives are the biggest factor here. I was thinking about getting a pure battery electric car (BEV) but the risk that worried me was how long the range would be in 8-10 years in the cold. I have a short commute now but I did not know where I would be living and working in 8-10 years!
My concerns are less about the vehicle technology but what gets implicitly bundled with it. Privacy, for example, being an issue, with newer cars being cellular equipped and having telemetry enabled and no way to opt out. Tesla is allowed all my GPS data, which I don't feel comfortable with. With an older car you're free to rebuild it within your means - can you legally do the same with an electric vehicle? With the hardware and software being so locked down, it may not even be legal to tamper with it, which on one hand is a valid concern for stuff like self-driving technology, but at the same time makes these newer cars proprietary black boxes that you can only ever send back to the factory.
If most people don't really need more than a couple hundred miles range, and batteries are by far the single most expensive component of an EV, then it doesn't really make sense that we're going to see significant changes in range. Probably it gets up to around 300 or so and stays about there indefinitely, or at least until a major shift in battery technology.
I was thinking more a Nissan Leaf as a Model 3 is a bit above my price range right now sadly. I recently had an 80 mile/day commute through a large valley/hill which would have been impossible in a used Leaf unless I could charge at work.
:/ That is a bit disingenuous in a narrow but long country. Norway is only 6km at its narrowest (Tysfjord) but is 2,500km long (and 25,000km of coastline).
Of course, the USA is enormous in comparison, especially width wise.
(Trying to find facts I binged into a few odd pages. Not that relevant to EVs or geography but this was an interesting comparison: https://www.ifitweremyhome.com/compare/US/NO)
"It's impossible for Norway, one of the biggest oil exporters in the world, to subsidize and tax domestic cars differently so that electric becomes the obvious choice!"
How do you make it fair if one type of car is guaranteed to wreck the planet? Hard to level that playing field. But Norway seems to have done a decent job of it.
Other than the fact that it's strong evidence that Norway doesn't give a shit about leveling your theoretical playing field in the climate change and carbon emissions game.
I am actually surprised I even have 300+ karma points in first place given my opinions.
The weird part is I haven't really said anything that is even remotely indicative that I do not care about the planet or I hate electric cars etc. (The holy values that invoke the pitchfork mob of HN).
The reason why most people are skeptical of electric cars in todays market is because a second hand $5000 corolla beats that $40K Tesla any day it terms of affordability. Sure we can all speed up the adoption of electric cars saying the households that own only electric cars need not pay taxes at all for next 5 years. USA might soon have 100% electric cars.
I merely pointed out that the cost of electric cars in Norway is being paid through taxes and hence 60% sales is not impossible but fully predictable.
It's a common issue especially with technical people. Their identity is tied up in things they know about the world and how things work. When you point out that either what they know is actually false, they know less than they think they do, or that the world is changing making what they know obsolete. They get upset and then want to punish you for that.
Automobiles are a perfect example. They are complex sources of powerful knowledge. And now about 80% of that is rapidly becoming dead knowledge that confers no power.
Then there is the issue of electricity shortage. Sweden for instance doesn’t have enough electricity to supply electric cars if everyone should have it. And then there is solar storm / EMP vulnerabilities with all electric infrastructure. And then there is cobolt shortage issues and production issues. No, I vote for E100 or gasdriven cars for the future.
because everyone will switch to electric cars tomorrow. Supply will accommodate the demand. There wasn't enough gas to go around when cars came out. Solar storm / EMP vulnerabilities? Are you fucking kidding me? How about OPEC as a tried and tested vulnerability? How about shortage of oil as finite resource as a vulnerability?
In total there were 18,375 cars registered in March compared to 11,106 in February '19 and 14,401 in March '18. If you back out the Tesla Model 3 impact (-5,300), you're left with 13,075 vehicles registered last month.
[1] Data source: https://ofv.no/bilsalget/bilsalget-i-mars-2019-1