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Norway, which already boasts the world's highest number of electric cars per capita, said Monday that electric or hybrid cars represented half of new registrations in the country so far this year.
"This is a milestone on Norway's road to an electric car fleet," Climate and Environment Minister Vidar Helgesen told AFP.
"And it serves to showcase that green transport policies work," he said in an email.
Sales of electric cars accounted for 17.6 percent of new vehicle registrations in January and hybrid cars accounted for 33.8 percent, for a combined 51.4 percent, according to figures from the Road Traffic Information Council (OVF).
In February, those proportions fell slightly but remained high at 15.8 percent and 32 percent, respectively.
Joke's on them. Electric cars can't work in places that are cold or have mountains.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by CoolHand on Tuesday March 07 2017, @12:28PM (5 children)
Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job-Douglas Adams
(Score: 4, Informative) by canopic jug on Tuesday March 07 2017, @01:04PM (1 child)
Too bad, that would set us back a whole 1 MPG. The gas mileage has stayed about the same since 1991 [phys.org].
The kicker is that many of the people that drive gas guzzlers don't realize they are funding madrassas around the world. Those are about the only activities that the middle eastern oil producing countries pump money into outside their borders.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 08 2017, @03:39AM
From the article:
"One fundamental problem with improving the average fuel economy of the on-road fleet is that improvements in fuel economy for new vehicles take a long time to substantially influence fuel economy of the entire on-road fleet," said Sivak, a research professor at UMTRI. "This is the case because it takes many years to turn over the fleet."
So right when fleets are finally starting to age out, we are going to cut-back on efficiency requirements.
That's smart...
(Score: 0, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 07 2017, @04:55PM (2 children)
You mean we might get sedans with reasonable space without having to resort to buying a "light truck" to get a decent amount of room? Tragic.
Also you hate-filled outrage-binging automaton of the fake-news media, if first true POTUS in decades is so anti-electric vehicle I wonder why Elon Musk is on-board with God-Empror's vision of the future. Maybe he knows better and you are just a shit-stain on tidy-whities of history?
PS. You morons are making this site into the old site, it is on the ropes.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 07 2017, @06:14PM
He isn't, but he is on a board to help advise the "God-Empror" on matters of trade and industry.
And this is good, because any leader who surrounds themself only with people who agree with them (or who are afraid to voice disagreement) is bound to make poor decisions based on incomplete information.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by DeathMonkey on Tuesday March 07 2017, @06:43PM
On board? Or, smart enough to realize how easy it is to manipulate the president by pretending to like him?
(Score: 2) by theluggage on Tuesday March 07 2017, @12:54PM (7 children)
Joke's on them. Electric cars can't work in places that are cold or have mountains.
Geography 101 - Norway - shedloads of hydroelectric power - should be easy to run electric cars off of genuinely renewable energy.
Then there's the question of local transport habits & housing. The weak spots of an electric car are (a) long, impromptu road trips and (b) housing with no garage or off-street parking. Any Norwegians care to comment on how these apply? How many cars never get more than 100 miles from Oslo?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 07 2017, @05:03PM
Ahhh good ole hydro electric, nothing can go wrong with that...
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Tuesday March 07 2017, @05:33PM
Well, in Norway they take a boat if they have to go 100 miles...
Other major factor: ICE cars are stupidly expensive in norway (twice the US price and up), courtesy of taxes that electrics don't have to pay.
So the electrics are price-competitive, which means you have very few reasons, if you have to buy two cars, not to get an electric one. Standard commutes in Norway are a lot shorter than in the US, and public transportation, including to the little town in the boonies where I went a few days, is decent, clean and practical.
Norway is the smartest Oil producer in the world.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Tuesday March 07 2017, @06:41PM (2 children)
Geography 101 - Norway - shedloads of oil, too. [indexmundi.com]
(Score: 2) by theluggage on Tuesday March 07 2017, @10:08PM (1 child)
So, more electric cars running off hydro = more oil left to export for big $$$
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Wednesday March 08 2017, @12:25AM
I guess I'd prefer they turn it into plastic. But, they are pretty aggressive with carbon capture, [norskpetroleum.no] so on the whole it's an improvement.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 07 2017, @08:58PM
It is one of the incentives in place to drive change.
(Score: 2) by fritsd on Wednesday March 08 2017, @06:47PM
Once when I was bored, I looked at an atlas, and traced the train network in Norway.
I was actually a bit shocked when I found out it just bloody stopped, because "costs too much dynamite to continue that far north" (dunno if that's really the reason, I just made it up)!
How do people actually *get* to Tromsø, Narvik etc.? By boat? By train via Sweden?
(Score: 2) by mth on Tuesday March 07 2017, @01:16PM (13 children)
Cold makes the batteries less efficient, but I'm not aware of any problem with mountains. In fact, I've heard an electric car driver tell that you can end up with more charge in the battery after descending a mountain than you had at the top, due to regenerative breaking.
By the way, I was in northern Finland some years ago and even the parked petrol cars are plugged into an electric socket there in winter: they have an electric heater that keeps the engine from freezing. So extreme cold is a problem for petrol cars as well.
(Score: 2) by bootsy on Tuesday March 07 2017, @02:05PM (2 children)
I take your point about regenerative energy but if you gain one way over the mountain you would lose the otherway or else you have perpetual motion.
Petrol engines in the cold aren't great and Diesel is better at working in colder temperatures so the heated garage or engine heater are common in Canada as well as Finland and indeed most of the Scandinavian countries.
How many people drive from Bergen to Oslo as the trains are pretty good from my experience of them?
(Score: 2) by mth on Tuesday March 07 2017, @03:11PM (1 child)
Yes, of course if you look at a full mountain climb, you end up with less energy in the battery at the end compared to before. But with a petrol car, the descent at best costs you zero fuel and leaves you with hot brakes. So I don't understand why the editor suggests that electric cars have trouble with mountains, as they seem to do better there than petrol cars.
(Score: 2) by Hawkwind on Tuesday March 07 2017, @06:03PM
If anyone is interested in why one would feel the need to be sarcastic here's a story from 2015 helping to debunk these points: http://www.treehugger.com/cars/going-uphill-tesla-passes-bunch-suvs-stuck-snow-video.html [treehugger.com]
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 07 2017, @02:07PM
> you can end up with more charge in the battery after descending a mountain than you had at the top, due to regenerative breaking.
We noticed this when making a long freeway descent into San Luis Obispo, CA in a Prius (~10 years ago). We had been driving for awhile on fairly level roads and my memory is that the battery was somewhere above half-charge. At the start of the hill, with foot off the "throttle pedal" the car held speed like an IC car in a lower gear -- think third gear on a five speed manual, so the friction brakes were not needed. Once the regenerative braking fully charged the battery, the Prius has no place to put further energy and the car no longer held speed on the hill. I was getting nervous about the brake temperature after a mile or two of heavy braking to maintain freeway speed.
Also, with the CVT transmission, the Prius powertrain control put some component(s) at a very high rpm--sounded like a jet engine spooling up on takeoff. My guess was that this was to maximize windage (and drag) to try and maintain some small amount of "engine braking" under this condition.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday March 07 2017, @02:11PM (3 children)
This simply can't be!!! Everybody knows the petrol cars are driven by ICE; so, the colder, the more ice available.
(grin)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 07 2017, @03:51PM (2 children)
So extreme cold is a problem for petrol cars as well.
This simply can't be!!! Everybody knows the petrol cars are driven by ICE; so, the colder, the more ice available.
(grin)
Is it really necessary to bring ICE [ice.gov] into *every* conversation around here?
This thread isn't even about immigration. Sheesh!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 08 2017, @01:13AM (1 child)
Norway has a 1619 km border with Sweden. Lots of bad dudes crossing. No-go zones everywhere. Need to get that under control, figure out what the hell is going on.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 08 2017, @01:52AM
Møøse bites Kan be pretti nasti.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 07 2017, @02:55PM (4 children)
Actually the advantage of electric in the mountains is that since they don't need air they don't lose power as the air gets thinner at higher altitudes.
However as what happened on Top Gear one time the human driving the vehicle will start to succumb to the lack of oxygen before the engine stops running.
(Score: 2) by Unixnut on Tuesday March 07 2017, @04:05PM (3 children)
Actually the advantage of electric in the mountains is that since they don't need air they don't lose power as the air gets thinner at higher altitudes.
Turbo engines (of which almost all small cars EU cars are nowadays) don't have this issue, they normalise the input air so no power is lost. In fact the original purpose of turbos was to normalise the inlet manifold pressure at high altitudes in aircraft engines. Non turbo engines compensate for the lower air pressure by putting in less fuel, so they don't really lose much efficiency. You compensate by applying more throttle, and the engine comes up to existing power levels at a higher throttle position.
You might have slightly increased energy loss due to increased friction due to higher RPM and lose volumetric efficiency. This is fine if you have a powerful engine and have some overhead (i.e. you can increase the throttle to compensate for power loss). if you have a tiny engine and you were near wide open throttle on the uphill at the start, your engine will lose power and you won't be able to do anything about it.
Hence, big overspecced engines are alright, and small engines have turbo's to assist in such situations.
By the way, I was in northern Finland some years ago and even the parked petrol cars are plugged into an electric socket there in winter: they have an electric heater that keeps the engine from freezing. So extreme cold is a problem for petrol cars as well.
That is a problem with a) initial ignition (which is hard in very cold air), and b) the actual metal getting too cold and possibly developing fractures, or moving parts freezing against one another. Once started the engine will be fine.
a) won't be a problem for electric cars (but loss of battery efficiency/charge will be, even when already running), and b) could well be a problem as well (electric cars still use aluminium/steel/etc... in their motive components, and have moving parts that can seize in the cold). So they may need motor/battery heaters anyway.
Cold makes the batteries less efficient, but I'm not aware of any problem with mountains. In fact, I've heard an electric car driver tell that you can end up with more charge in the battery after descending a mountain than you had at the top, due to regenerative breaking.
I don't get this. If you have 60 units of energy, and you use 30 units of energy to climb a mountain (minus losses), how can going down the mountain result in more than 30 units of energy being returned? If that was true you could charge your car to full by doing nothing more than repeatedly climbing and going down a mountain, which is a violation of the basic physics of energy.
What is more likely? that a) perpetual motion has been licked by electric car manufacturers, or b) the battery charge/capacity thingy is lying to the driver (or being "overwhelmingly optimistic", if you like your euphemisms).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 07 2017, @05:45PM (1 child)
Or the base of the mountain on one side has a higher altitude than the other.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 07 2017, @09:34PM
If you start on a plateau, climb a mountain, and descend to an elevation BELOW your starting elevation before you climbed the mountain, then yes, you can gain net battery energy. You of course would lose it if you repeated the trip in the reverse direction.
(Score: 2) by Nuke on Tuesday March 07 2017, @08:51PM
I don't get this. If you have 60 units of energy, and you use 30 units of energy to climb a mountain (minus losses), how can going down the mountain result in more than 30 units of energy being returned? If that was true you could charge your car to full by doing nothing more than repeatedly climbing and going down a mountain, which is a violation of the basic physics of energy.
You don't understand. The GP only ever goes downhill. There he goes [charliemccarron.com].
(Score: -1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 07 2017, @04:18PM (1 child)
When asked about the adaptation of electric and hybrid cars, the politicians in neighboring Sweden responded:
"We do not break down our new car statistics by type of car. That is not helpful. Whether electric or hybrid cars are over-represented in new car statistics would only stoke fires of racism. Even if it is true, electric and hybrid cars are also over-represented in desirable-cars category, so really it is not because electric or hybrid cars are too numerous among new cars that is the problem, it is that they are desirable. And they have no control over that. We just have to work at making all cars equally desirable. By allowing every car to have the same opportunity we will ensure that no car is over-represented in desirability statistics."
After the news conference, the politician had to be re-wound before addressing questions about the migrant crime statistics.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 08 2017, @07:16AM
That's why I call it Sjweden.