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Electric car sales keep climbing and climbing in Norway. In 2013, many of us were shocked to learn that electric cars were account [sic] for about 10–15% of new car sales in the country. We are now well aware of the fact that the Norway electric vehicle market is in a league of its own, and just yesterday I wrote about the breakdown of June electric car sales in the picturesque country. But I skipped one important note, the percentage of new car sales that were electric car sales.
Jeff Cobb reminded me of this important matter when he published an article yesterday highlighting that 22.9% of new cars in Norway are now plug-in electrified cars. And if you want some serious perspective here, catch this line: "Comprised of battery electric cars and plug-in hybrids, if the same thing were to happen in the US on a percentage basis, it would have meant 1,943,177 new [Plugin Electric Vehicles] PEVs on American roads since January." We have 50,503 new PEVs on our roads since January, about 2.6% of that number....
It's still a small fraction of the total vehicle fleet in Norway, but it signals a shift in car buyer preferences. What percentage or absolute number of EV purchases constitutes a tipping point?
Editor's Note: It's worth noting that while Norway exports a fair amount of North and Berents Sea oil and gas products, their domestic production of electricity is primarily from hydro-electric schemes with thermal and wind schemes thrown into the mix as minor contributors. Reference with interesting stats in the tables here: Statistics Norway
Original Submission
(Score: 2) by subs on Saturday July 18 2015, @01:28PM
Norway: estimated $8,000 per year savings from vehicle tax, free parking, free ferries (go look at a map of Norway!) and free use of toll roads. I'm assuming this includes savings on highly-taxed Norwegian fuel, and the freedom from 25% sales tax on purchase.
Had a look at the cleantechnica article and noticed that cheap fuel is third on the list of major incentives of what motivated people and even so only accounts for 15%. Pretty much the rest are subsidies of one form or another. In other words, the adoption rate is incredibly artificially inflated. I bet I could also get the adoption rate for any technology pretty high if I were giving it away at near free. The government will sooner or later need to make a decision: keep the incentives and accept a cut in tax revenues, or remove the incentives and accept a slowing the adoption rate. In fact, it seems to me that the adoption rate of EVs is directly proportional to the amount of subsidy the government is willing to throw in. In Norway, where subsidies are fat, adoption is high. In California, where subsidies are still pretty good, it's lower, but still, it's there. In the place where I live, subsidies for EVs are nearly non-existent and I don't think I've ever seen one in the wild. That, combined with the lack of infrastructure was the reason why I got a hybrid (would have gotten a PHEV if they weren't so outrageously expensive and I had some place to charge it).
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Saturday July 18 2015, @02:56PM
Presumably the subsidies would sunset after some percentage of the existing vehicle fleet had been reached.
If 1 in 4 new car purchases in Norway is an EV or PHEV, how long before social acceptance of EVs is achieved? Human beings generally have a herd mentality when it comes to change. Malcolm Gladwell took a pretty good stab at trying to codify it. I don't know that he achieved a mathematical model with predictive power, but his "tipping point" term stuck. Network theory is fascinating; I do hope that somewhere somebody leaks the key findings from all the Big Data that's being collected. It would revolutionize sociology.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by theluggage on Saturday July 18 2015, @09:36PM
If 1 in 4 new car purchases in Norway is an EV or PHEV, how long before social acceptance of EVs is achieved?
I don't think irrational social acceptance of EVs is an issue - the issues are price and practicality.
When the base price of an EV is 50% more than a comparable petrol car, subsidies help a lot - directly in the short term and by bootstrapping demand in the longer term (higher volumes = lower prices).
Practicality is mainly down to the range issue. I don't think battery powered EVs are ever going to match petrol for carefree, long-distance trips, but increased range and better infrastructure will help, and subsidies will increase demand for those. Also, subsidies can sweeten the pill - If I could save $8000/year through subsidies, I'd have less qualms about maybe needing to hire a petrol car for the holidays!
However, the tipping point is rapidly going to be followed by a sticking point: once EVs start to become mainstream, some of the tax breaks will have to disappear, and new problems will arise: the EVs in the bus/carpool lane will starting to cause congestion; the toll road and ferries will start to lose serious revenue and there's now a queue for those 2 charger bays... Those aren't insurmountable problems, but someone needs to plan for them.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Saturday July 18 2015, @03:11PM
It seems to me they could add in key benefits that really wouldn't cost them that much in order to encourage more people to move to EVs. For example, here in New York you can take the HOV lane as a sole occupant if you're driving an EV. The marginal cost to the polity of doing that is very low. California does better with its EV parking spots that are in prime position next to the handicapped spots in the lot. But again the incremental cost of mandating that is quite low. If they threw in other such measures like letting EVs drive in the bus lane, enter state parks for free, and generally make the driving experience for them "first class" it would motivate a lot of people.
But that's the icing on the cake. I've been driving my brother-in-law's BMW i3 around for a few months and putting it through its paces. The acceleration is great, smooth and totally silent, as is the braking. It's instantly reponsive, with no lag for gear shifts. And not having to visit a gas station ever feels quite liberating. Plug the thing in overnight and you're set; and doing that is not hard to remember as most of us have gotten used to doing that with our phones. No oil changes, no maintenance apart from windshield wiper fluid. It's a revelation. It makes it hard to go back to driving my own gas car. I've been talking to my brother-in-law about it as we go along, and also my younger brother who's an engineer at Ford and started driving a BMW i3 as well about 5 months ago, and we all agree that you can't go back to an ICE after getting used to the advantages of an EV.
Washington DC delenda est.