Norway races ahead of EU in electric car shake-up

Nordic country on track to end electric car sales by 2025

A factory worker assembles a Volkswagen ID.5 electric car in Zwickau, Germany. Getty

Norway and Iceland are at the vanguard of Europe’s electric car revolution, an industry report found, leaving EU members trailing behind.

More than 62 per cent of cars registered in oil and gas-producing Norway in 2021 were powered by batteries, with Tesla the leading player in that market.

The fleet of 100,000 new electric vehicles makes it “very likely” that the Nordic country will meet its target of ending petrol car sales by 2025, said Michael Schwendiger of Austrian green mobility watchdog VCOe.

The EU has proposed a 2035 cut-off, but its 27 members are still mostly producing cars that contribute to greenhouse gas emissions.

The bloc’s electric car frontrunners, the Netherlands and Sweden, each registered about one all-electric vehicle in every five, according to VCOe’s rankings.

At the other end of the scale, fossil fuel-heavy countries in Eastern Europe such as the Czech Republic and Slovakia registered few electric vehicles.

Across the EU, about 9 per cent of new cars were electric, putting the bloc behind third parties such as Iceland (33 per cent), Switzerland (13 per cent) and Britain (12 per cent) as well as Norway.

Germany’s prolific car industry produced more than 350,000 electric vehicles, the most in Europe, but these accounted for only 14 per cent of the total.

The new coalition government in Berlin has promised a huge expansion of charging infrastructure to help this figure rise to more than a million a year by 2030.

French cities, meanwhile, have moved to shut the most polluting vehicles out of urban centres – although Paris last week had to push back the next step in that process.

Another problem, Mr Schwendiger said, is that even electric cars were not immune to wasting energy by being too bulky and overpowered.

Analysts are calling for this energy use to be taken into account in subsidies for electric cars, given the finite supply of electricity from renewable sources.

Several European countries, including France and Germany, offer financial incentives to motorists to choose electric cars.

But “energy guzzlers do not deserve support”, Mr Schwendiger said.

More than 20 countries and 11 carmakers signed a pledge at last year’s Cop26 summit to end the sale of polluting cars by 2040.

But some of Europe’s big players in the auto industry, including Germany’s Volkswagen and BMW and France’s Renault, were absent from the list.

The 2035 proposal by the European Commission comes with an interim target of reducing car emissions by 55 per cent this decade.

However, the commission will face a battle to steer the proposal through the 27-member European Council and get it past the European Parliament.

Norway, by contrast, agreed its 2025 timetable six years ago and wants city buses to be zero-emission or use biomass energy by that date.

The electric car boom led to Tesla becoming the outright leader in Norway’s passenger vehicle market in 2021, pushing Volkswagen into second place.

The Tesla Model 3 was the single most popular model of the year in Norway ahead of Toyota's hybrid Rav4, which has an internal combustion engine.

Britain has a 2030 target for ending the sale of petrol cars. The government says about 6,000 high-powered charging stations will be needed on motorways and major roads by 2035.