Norway is all in on electric cars. What can the U.S. learn? todayheadline

In January, the Norwegian Road Federation released a statistic that turned heads inside transportation and climate circles: Almost 90 percent of new cars sold in Norway the previous year were fully electric. By the end of this year, the government expects sales of new gasoline and diesel cars to fall to zero and meet its goal to end the sale of new gasoline-powered cars by 2025.

In a country known for snowcapped mountains, dramatic fjords, and the Northern Lights — and often ranked as one of the “happiest countries in the world” — gasoline-powered cars appear to be on their way to extinction.

The transition is already visible in Oslo. The capital city’s dense urban core is filled with Teslas and Volkswagen ID.4s rather than petrol hatchbacks. Charging stations are commonplace and tucked beside apartment blocks and supermarkets. Delivery vans glide past with barely a whisper. On the highways outside the capital, chargers are spaced every 30 miles or so. Even in the country’s northernmost provinces, where winters are long and temperatures fall well below freezing, EVs are becoming the norm.

“Norway is the undisputed king of electric vehicles,” said Benjamin Sovacool, the director of the Institute for Global Sustainability at Boston University. “Their per capita rates are much higher than anyone in the world, something like 20 times higher than China, which are the second-biggest market.”

In comparison, only about 15 percent of the vehicles sold in the rest of Europe are electric. The United States, meanwhile, hasn’t even cleared 10 percent, according to Edmunds, the online automotive research group.

Norway’s achievement is even more striking because the nation has no domestic automobile manufacturing industry — the most popular vehicle is the American-made Tesla — and it is one of the world’s leading exporters of fossil fuels.

Norway’s EV commitment has turned the nation into a kind of global laboratory for electrification — proof, some American EV advocates argue, that a full transition away from gasoline is not only possible but imminent. Indeed, for policymakers in the United States — especially those pursuing similar electric vehicle targets in California and beyond — the Nordic EV revolution raises an urgent question: Can the country’s success be replicated, or is it the product of conditions too unique to scale?

For more than a decade, California has positioned itself as the vanguard of U.S. decarbonization policy. In 2022, after receiving a waiver from efficiency standards set under the Clean Air Act, the state announced a ban on the sale of new gasoline-powered cars by 2035 — a move later adopted, in whole or part, by 17 other states and the District of Columbia. As of late 2024, about 25 percent of all new cars registered in California were electric.

At the same time, the rest of the country is not keeping pace, and with the return of a Republican-led administration to the White House, the political terrain has shifted once again. 

Among the first acts of President Donald Trump’s second administration was to suspend funding for the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (NEVI) program, while rolling back California’s efforts to reduce vehicle emissions. A number of states and nonprofits filed lawsuits over the administration’s freeze on NEVI funds and the Government Accountability Office found that the freeze violated the law. Still, legal and political battles ahead are likely to be protracted. In May, both the House and Senate voted to block California’s planned 2035 phase-out.

The result is a volatile and uncertain policy landscape — one that contrasts sharply with the kind of long-term stability that allowed Norway to engineer its transition. In that sense, the more relevant question, some experts say, may not hinge on what Norway has achieved, but on the idiosyncrasies that made that achievement possible, and whether any of that can be recreated in a country as economically and politically fragmented as the United States.

The keys to success, according to experts like Sovacool and Erlend Hermansen, a senior researcher who specializes in climate science and policy analysis at CICERO Center for International Climate Research at the University of Oslo, are promoting stable, long-term policies that support electric vehicle sales and driving, generous incentives, and developing a robust charging network.

This is “probably one of the most important innovations that Norway has contributed” toward reducing greenhouse gas emissions and addressing climate change, said Hermansen. “It is absolutely possible to achieve in other countries.”

As part of the global push to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, more than 50 countries have set ambitious targets, announced plans, or signed pledges to ban the sale of new cars with combustion engines, including Canada, China, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the European Union. Most of the target dates are between 2030 and 2050.

While China has the largest overall number of electric vehicles, Norway has far higher numbers per capita. In 2020, Norway became the first nation where more than half of new car sales were electric vehicles. One year later, that share reached 75 percent. And last year, 89 percent of all new cars were EVs, according to the Norwegian Road Federation.

Yet Norway is also one of the world’s leading exporters of fossil fuels. It is the seventh-largest exporter of crude oil, the fourth-largest exporter of natural gas, and the largest supplier of natural gas to the European Union. “It is clearly a paradox,” said Bard Lahn, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Oslo’s Center for Technology, Innovation, and Culture.

Lahn takes issue with Norwegian politicians who “argue that climate policy should focus on reducing the demand for oil, but that oil production should be allowed to continue as long as there is still demand for oil in the world market.”

“This is clearly a much too simplistic and convenient way of seeing it,” he said.

Sovacool, however, believes this is true for almost every major economy. He pointed to China, for example, as both the top installer and builder of fossil fuel infrastructure and the leading investor in renewable energy and low-carbon technologies. “Both can, and often are, true at the same time,” he said, because the government is seeking “to improve energy security through whatever energy resources they have at their disposal.”

“At least they use fossil fuel endowments to promote low-carbon innovation,” he added, “unlike say a country like Russia, Saudi Arabia, or the United States, which use those endowments to reinvest in fossil fuels.”

In a Zoom call with Undark, Marie Aarestrup Aasness, a transportation economist with Norwegian Public Roads Administration, suggested that the assumption Norwegians are somehow more environmentally conscious was inaccurate. The primary driver behind the country’s EV boom, she said, “is the generous package of incentives and subsidies provided by the Norwegian government.”

Most of those subsidies and incentives have been made possible by the high taxes imposed on offshore fossil fuel production — up to almost 80 percent, according to The Norwegian Offshore Directorate and Ministry of Energy. Revenue accounted for almost $37 billion in 2024.

The Norwegian campaign to adopt electric vehicles began around 1990, a few decades after the discovery of vast offshore oil and gas reserves. The government began offering subsidies and incentives to switch to electric vehicles, including major tax breaks for EV buyers, much higher taxes and costs for conventional vehicles, reduced road taxes, and reduced tolls and ferry fees. Other incentives include free parking and a nationwide EV charging infrastructure that includes free charging in both urban and rural areas.

In addition, electric vehicles have been exempted from Norway’s 25 percent value added tax — the national sales tax — since 2001. This was amended in 2023 to only electric vehicles under $50,000 dollars.

Many of the early policy proposals to encourage EV adoption were drafted with very little data, according to a recent analysis conducted by Erik Figenbaum, the chief research engineer at the Institute of Transport Economics. “Politicians had limited information about the effects of policies they introduced in this ‘learning by doing process,’” he wrote in the paper, published in The World Electric Vehicle Journal, a peer-reviewed publication. “Impact assessments were rarely made. The decision rationale was often not documented.”

But today’s policies are data driven, the paper noted, based on a growing body of evidence about electric vehicle adoption, driving patterns, and the costs and benefits of incentive programs. “One key lesson is that to achieve wide adoption, you need a range of complementary policies to support EVs,” such as tax incentives, preferential parking and access to bus lanes, said Lahn.

At the same time, he added, there is also “an important lesson in not forgetting that EVs actually do not solve all the problems of private car ownership,” such as congestion and limited urban parking spaces. In fact, researchers and policymakers are now considering ways to scale back EV incentives to address lower tax revenues while continuing to promote biking, walking, and public transportation.

Recent research by Aasness, the transportation economist, analyzed longitudinal data collected from drivers in and around Oslo to gauge their attitudes toward electric vehicles, tax subsidies, and incentives. The study focused on about 6,400 people who completed an annual questionnaire between 2014 and 2020 to record their attitudes toward incentives for EVs such as free parking, free tolls, and access to bus lanes. The data showed that those attitudes have changed as EVs become widespread.

Read Next

How the Trump administration is targeting green transportation in blue states

Almost half of the survey participants disagree that EV drivers should be exempt from paying tolls. And between 60 and 70 percent of drivers do not believe that EVs should have free public parking and access to bus lanes without passengers. Most EV drivers in Norway “understand that as EVs become more mainstream, the financial incentives will be reduced or eliminated,” she said. “They think it’s more reasonable to have reduced charging or access to public bus lanes with passengers.”

In the United States, meanwhile, state-level tax credits that were beginning to have a substantial impact on EV sales and adoption during the 2010s are becoming less popular, according to a recent analysis of nationwide EV tax incentives. And President Donald Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill,” which recently passed in the House, proposes to charge EV owners a $250 annual fee.

Many of the distinctions separating Norway’s experience from the United States’ are obvious — including the fact that the former had no legacy gasoline car industry to protect. “There’s no Detroit, no legacy carmakers striving to shape policy,” Christof Engelskirchen, chief economist of Autovista Group, a division of automotive market analysis firm J.D. Power, recently wrote. “That means less resistance to disruptive change and no powerful lobby pushing back when lawmakers tilt the playing field toward electrification.”

Another key distinction between Norway and United States is the ease of access to charging stations. Norway currently has the most chargers per electric vehicle in the world with a network of more than 22,000 public charging stations, according to a 2023 report by McKinsey & Company. This means that despite Norway’s long, cold winters, which reduce charging speed and battery power, electric vehicles can operate as reliably there as in any other country in the Northern Hemisphere, according to research by Felix Schulz and Johannes Rode at the Technical University of Darmstadt. In addition, electric vehicles have reported “no aggravated or excessive number of breakdowns,” Sovacool wrote in an email, “or instances of where people have been stranded because their EV didn’t work.”

Read Next

What Tesla’s massive image problem means for the world’s transition to EVs

The EV charging infrastructure in the United States, on the other hand, is not nearly as fully developed. That’s unsurprising, given that Norway is geographically a much smaller country — about the size of Montana with the population of metropolitan Phoenix — and installing a viable charging infrastructure in a condensed landscape is far easier than doing it in the vastness of the U.S. And while the supply of private and public chargers is largely on track to keep pace with the modest projected growth in American EV sales, according to a recent analysis by the International Council on Clean Transportation, not everyone can readily access them.

Disparities in income, location, and race continue to create uneven access to electric vehicle charge points, according to another statistical model published in January in the journal Applied Energy.

Whatever progress has been made on promoting EV sales and charging infrastructure in the U.S. is also likely to see continued challenges from the Trump administration, experts say. The White House recently announced the administration will discontinue many of the clean energy policies sponsored by the Biden administration.

There are currently at least 126 public chargers in operation at 31 NEVI stations in nine states, according to the Joint Office of Energy and Transportation. It is unclear if the White House can redirect congressionally mandated funding, said Peter Slowik, an electric vehicle policy analyst at the International Council on Clean Transportation.

All of this would seem to suggest that Norway’s EV revolution is less of a model for the U.S. than advocates suggest. Norway’s adoption curve is the result of several decades of planning by a succession of coalition governments at the national level, along with complementary provincial and local policies. The data-driven mix of financial and driving incentives have been refined over time, and, today, researchers and policymakers are reviewing current mandates in an effort to complete the nation’s EV transition while easing congestion and increasing toll and parking revenues.

“Norway shows that a geographically smaller country with a much smaller population can become a global leader,” Sovacool said.

That leaves the U.S. — a much larger country with more fractured politics and a deeper legacy of gas-powered manufacturing — with lingering questions of conviction, according to Autovista’s Engelskirchen. “The question for the U.S. is not whether the path is possible,” he wrote in a May 5 essay for Automotive News. “It’s whether Americans find that future desirable and are willing to invest the billions it will take to get there. Because, while EV technology keeps advancing, it isn’t technology, but instead policy, infrastructure, and consumer economics that will decide whether the U.S. accelerates toward an EV future. Or stalls.”