Tesla boom lifts Norway's electric car sales to record market share

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-norway-autos-idUSKCN1RD2BB

by lelf • 7 years ago

99 51 7 years ago

reuters.com

pdq• 7 years ago

April story.

ceejayoz• 7 years ago

Musk tweeted about it 20 minutes ago, which is probably why it's here now.

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1138136540096319488

lucideer• 7 years ago

This is a very oddly positioned story. The Nissan Leaf "lift[ed] Norway's electric car sales to record market share" before Tesla's Model 3 surpassed the Leaf in sales.

The article seems to be making out that Tesla have been the cause of the record EV sales in Norway. In actuality, Tesla have recently become the most popular EV there, but EV sales were record-breaking before that.

zaroth10• 7 years ago

Tesla is the cause of the current record sales of EVs in Norway, per TFA;

In 2018, Norway’s fully electric car sales rose to a record 31.2 percent market share from 20.8 percent in 2017, far ahead of any other nation, and buyers had to wait as producers struggled to keep up with demand.
The surge of electric cars to a 58.4 percent market share in March came as Tesla ramped up delivery of its mid-sized Model 3...

30% -> 60% is no small feat, and is due to the Model 3 availability, and the more widely accessible price point of TM3.

IMO the Leaf is a compromise car you choose in order to get an EV, whereas the TM3 is a better car in almost every way than anything else on the market, which also happens to be EV.

Although many of its advantages are made possible by being EV, they are not inherent advantages of being EV. That is to say, being EV is necessary but not sufficient to built a car with the myriad advances of the TM3.

shereadsthenews2• 7 years ago

Tesla performs this stunt constantly. What they do is they don't deliver any cars for months at a time, whether because they can't or choose not to I don't know. Then they dump all the backorders on some small nation all at once and put out a press release about how they are the best-selling car in that place because they recognized a year of sales in a single month.

semi-extrinsic2• 7 years ago

Meh, these monthly fluctuations are dominated by noise, especially when expressed as "percentage of total sales". You get both the variation in EV sales and in ICE sales influencing.

Look at the trends in the absolute numbers over time:

https://elbilstatistikk.no/

Xylakant5• 7 years ago

I’d be generally cautious with month-to-month stats. Tesla has many preorders and only started really fulfilling the european ones in March. So hey could easily have gamed the stats by shifting many February sales to March.

throwayEngineer• 7 years ago

IMO the Leaf is a compromise car you choose in order to get an EV, whereas the TM3 is a better car in almost every way than anything else on the market,

This is definitely your opinion.

Experts agree that Tesla is a low quality luxury vehicle.

Fans love it, but this is a known phenomenon with Jeep owners too. Jeep owners will forgive problems where other users would not.

heavenlyhash• 7 years ago

Oslo resident here.

Indeed.

Look also to:

- the near-universality of charger stations on streets, both in residential and commercial districts;

- the huge tax subsidies for buying and owning electric vehicles;

- the low cost of (clean, incidentally) electricity (I believe most of the charger posts in the city are free, though I should note I don't drive myself);

- the substantial tarrifs and fees for poluting vehicles in the city center areas (we're talking more than a cup of coffee's cost to enter ring 1, as well as lighter but still extant fees for the larger outer rings);

- as well as some air control days where vehicles with exhaust may be outright forbidden from operating in the city center entirely...

- and all of these pressures are being tuned up over time. It's widely-discussed and part of campaigns to make things greener. So people are not only responding to the current numbers, but considering the future.

This has everything to do with the society, its incentives, and how those incentives were rationally designed; and very, very little to do with a particular manufacturer and their marketing.

Theodores• 7 years ago

Hi Oslo resident.

Just had a streetview browse of your city, first view with the yellow man gave me an oncoming Tesla. I had a look for the chargers but didn't find any, I guess you need an app and to know what to look for.

More noticeable are the trams. Forget electric cars, trams are the future and I liked seeing so many of them. I tried to stay off the tramways as you aren't going to have charging points there, but now I want to know, if you didn't have an app, where would you look in Oslo for a street level charging facility?

Kind of inspired to go there after seeing the sunny day street view pics, lovely place!

bagacrap• 7 years ago

Isn't the country's enormous wealth largely due to the sale of fossil fuels? Tax incentives for EV usage are great, but it's only possible because of the rest of the world's dependence on oil. It's really hard to take any lesson or even comfort from a story like this. It's not possible for everyone to offshore their carbon footprint.

xenospn2• 7 years ago

It's also important to point out that the cost of a cup of coffee in Oslo is more than most breakfasts in the US.

ecares• 7 years ago

Meanwhile, France just decided that electric cars must be producing an artificial soud out of security.

RankingMember• 7 years ago

Noise makers are being added by law lots of places for good reason, but that's a bit off-topic isn't it?

zaroth10• 7 years ago

It’s somewhat on topic as it reduces the desirability of an EV doesn’t it?

IMO, they should require either a noise maker, or a sufficiently advanced pedestrian collision avoidance safety system.

I would think that at the speed and in the scenarios a noise maker would help, a pedestrian safety system should be highly effective.

pi-rat2• 7 years ago

I kinda like the space ship sound my EV makes while driving slow (under 20 km/h?). It's not very noticeable inside the vehicle. And makes way less noise than fossil cars on the outside.

I can also disable it until next trip, but I guess future laws might change that.

sim_card_map• 7 years ago

Well done, Norway! If only the rest of the world would follow with the same pace. At least rich countries like Denmark, Switzerland etc

Tesla boom lifts Norway's electric car sales to record market share

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