Norway leads in electric car sales

ALMOST a third of all new cars sold in Norway (挪威) last year were purely electric, a new world record as the country strives to end sales of fossil-fueled vehicles by 2025.
In a bid to cut carbon emissions and air pollution, Norway exempts battery-driven cars from most taxes and offers benefits such as free parking and charging points to hasten a shift from diesel and petrol engines.
The independent Norwegian Road Federation (NRF) said that electric cars rose to 31.2 percent of all sales last year, from 20.8 percent in 2017 and just 5.5 percent in 2013, while sales of petrol and diesel cars plunged. “It was a small step closer to the 2025 goal,” by which time Norway’s parliament wants all new cars to be emissions-free, said NRF head Oeyvind Solberg Thorsen. Still, he cautioned that two-thirds of almost 148,000 cars sold in 2018 in Norway used fossil fuel or were hybrids.
The sales figures consolidate Norway’s global lead in electric car sales per capita, part of an attempt by Western Europe’s biggest producer of oil and gas to transform to a greener economy.
The International Energy Agency (IEA), using a slightly different yardstick for electric vehicles that includes hybrids that can be plugged in, showed Norway’s share of such cars at 39 percent in 2017, far ahead of Iceland (冰島) in second-place at 12 percent and Sweden (瑞典) at six percent.
By contrast, such electric cars had a 2.2 percent share in China in 2017 and 1.2 percent in the United States, IEA data show.

(This article is published on Junior Standard on 26 September 2019)

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