Electric car sales grew by 40% in Norway this year

Norway is the leading market for electric vehicles and it keeps showing the rest of the world how fast electric vehicle adoption can happen.

In 2018, EV sales grew by 40% in Norway and 1 out of 3 vehicles sold in the market was a zero-emission vehicle.

According to the Norwegian Road Traffic Information (OFV) via NTB, out of the 147,929 new passenger cars registered in 2018, 31.2 percent were all-electric vehicles.

If we are adding all plug-in vehicles, it increases to 49.1 percent of the market.

That’s for the entire year, but some months were even higher.

In October, we reported that 45% of new cars were all-electric and 60% were plug-in in Norway.

Øyvind Solberg Thorsen, CEO of the Norwegian Road Traffic Information, said about the 2018 numbers:

“2018 was the year when new passenger cars that go on alternative fuels fortified their strong position in the market […] With this, Norway consolidates itself in the top layer in the world when it comes to selling cars with alternative fuel.”

The Nissan Leaf was the most popular all-electric vehicle in the market.

Tesla also had another good year in the market, which remains its biggest in Europe – though The Netherlands came very close this year.

The American electric automaker delivered 8,623 vehicles in Norway in 2018 – up by 161 units from the previous year.

Solberg Thorsen also noted that the broader auto market declined in Norway and it actually attributes it to people waiting for more electric options:

“We notified a decline, but especially due to the delivery situation for electric cars and the transition to a new measurement method for consumption, the downward trend has been somewhat stronger than expected.”

Earlier this year, we reported that Norway has over 30,000 electric vehicle pre-orders with Tesla Model 3 and the Audi e-tron accounting for most of the reservations.

Norway aims for all new cars to be all-electric by 2025. It’s the most aggressive goal of any market.

Electrek’s Take

This is impressive, but I think the 2019 numbers are going to dwarf those numbers.

The launch of Model 3 in Norway alone is going to give a massive boost to the EV numbers. You add to that the e-tron and the few other EVs hitting the market in 2019 and it’s going to be crazy.

I can see all-electric vehicles hitting close to 70% of total sales in 2019, which would be incredible with no other market even close to that.