Norway

Last month, we reported that Tesla was on track for record deliveries in Norway as its electric car market soars. As it turns out, Tesla crushed the record and now Norway confirmed that their new passenger car registrations hit the lowest CO2 emissions ever.
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Norway has always been an important market for Tesla thanks to the country’s aggressive electric car incentives, but it’s quite apparently still growing.

Tesla is now on track for a record month of deliveries to close the quarter strong in the country.
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Norway has been a leader in electric car adoption for years now, but this year brought them to a new level as they keep beating new records with electric cars reaching a record 42% of Norway’s total new car sales in June.

The electric car market was also interesting last month with Volkswagen delivering a record 996 all-electric VW e-Golfs in the country.
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While most countries have difficulties making electric cars reach 2% or 3% of their total car sales, Norway keeps pushing the bar higher and higher.

Last month was another record month for the country with electric cars representing 42% of its new vehicles being registered.
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We were talking just the other day about how slow it is to change the automotive market because of its gigantic size. With around 2 billion cars on the roads around the world and an annual production capacity of roughly 100 million cars, it takes 20 years to update the global fleet. It means that once all new cars sold are equipped with a new technology, like electric propulsion, it can take up to 20 years to refresh the fleet.

Of course, some markets will get there before others. Electric vehicles currently have difficulties reaching 3% market share in most countries. Norway has long been the exception to the rule and it is now breaking more market share records.
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Norway, a global leader in electric vehicle adoption, announced that it reached the milestone of 100,000 all-electric vehicles on the roads – something only a few countries can claim and certainly none of the size of Norway (~5.2 million people). It’s important to note here that we are talking about all-electric zero-emission vehicles (BEVs) and not just plug-in vehicles.

Despite this important milestone and being the global leader, BEVs only represent 3% of the vehicles on the road in Norway. The country has one of the most aggressive timelines to convert its entire fleet to zero-emission and it hopes its electric vehicle policies will inspire other countries, but the exploit also highlights how difficult it is to convert a national car fleet.
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Norway’s generous electric vehicle incentives helped the country become the top EV market per capita in the world. The government was set to phase out some of the incentives, like the exemption of the 25% VAT, but Norwegian news now reports that they passed an initiative to keep the VAT exemption for electric vehicles until 2020.
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Norway is still moving down the list of Tesla’s top-selling markets with another disappointing quarter in deliveries for the Model S. The market was the automaker’s biggest in Europe with about 8% of its total worldwide deliveries last year.
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Last year, we reported that Norway’s Consumer Council was now acting as a mediator between Tesla and over 150 Model S P85D owners in the country because of issues over how Tesla was advertising the power rating of the vehicle or its motors.

Tesla says that the Consumer Council agreed with the automaker, but the complaint has since been moved to the Consumer Disputes Commission, which recently released its verdict in favor of the Model S owners.
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Norway’s four main political parties have been discussing a possible ban on new gasoline-powered car sales (diesel or petrol) for quite some time, but they were not able to come to an understanding until now, according to a new report from Dagens Næringsliv (Paywall), an important newspaper in Norway.

The four main political parties, both from the right and the left, have agreed on a new energy policy that will include a ban on new gasoline-powered car sales as soon as 2025 – making it one of the most aggressive timeline of its kind for such a policy. What’s probably most remarkable here is that Norway is currently one of the world’s largest Oil exporters. 
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Norwegian media are reporting that Tesla’s Norway operations have been hit with 240 payment demands from creditors over NOK 2 million (~$250,000) in unpaid bills and as a result, the company has received a ‘C’ credit rating – the worst credit rating it can get in Norway.

The reports suggest that the most recent unpaid bill claims coincide with Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s visit in the country last week.
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Norway is a very important market for Tesla. It’s the automaker’s biggest in Europe and about 8% of its total worldwide deliveries last year. In 2015, Tesla had flat deliveries in the country after delivering the exact same number, 4,039 Model S units, two years in a row, based on registration data.

It is still impressive for a relatively small country – though with a lot of EV incentives – but Tesla is definitely not growing in Norway anymore, or at least for the time being.
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Based on registration data, Tesla’s Model S sales were exactly flat in Norway last year versus 2014 –  4,039 units each year. The company’s overall sales in the country are likely to grow this year when it starts delivering the Model X later in the year, but in the meantime, it is interesting to see how Model S sales are doing in one of Tesla’s most important market and one of the rare market in which the company didn’t grow last year.
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A Tesla Model S caught fire while charging at a Supercharger in Norway on New Year’s day. No one was in the car when the fire started and fortunately nobody was harmed, but the car almost completely burned down.

The authorities and Tesla launched investigations to determine the cause of the fire. Last week, the police released the scene of the Supercharger for the ‘crime technical examination’. Today we learn that the ‘Accident Investigation Board’ (AIBN) is shutting down the investigation, but not before disclosing that they found indications that the fire “originated in the car”.
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Tesla had an incredible year for sales and deliveries in 2015. The California-based automaker delivered 50,580 vehicles last year, which represents a 60% increase over the previous year. It’s hard to find any weaknesses with such an incredible sales performance. Yet the company increased its deliveries in almost all markets but Norway, where according to registration data, Tesla delivered the exact same number of Model S’s in 2014 and 2015: 4,039 units.
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Five days ago a Tesla Model S caught fire while plugged-in at a Supercharger in Gjerstad, Norway. When we first reported on the event last week, Tesla said that nobody was harmed and they are undergoing a full investigation.

The investigation is not over, but today we learn that local police released the scene of the Supercharger after not being able to find a problem with the fast-charging station.
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A Tesla Model S caught fire while plugged-in at a Supercharger in Norway, and almost completely burned down to nothing. The event happened at 14.30 Friday afternoon (local time) at a Tesla fast-charging station in Gjerstad, Norway
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Tesla needs to deliver a record-breaking ~17,000 units in the last quarter of the year to achieve the low-end of its 2015 delivery guidance of  50,000-55,000 vehicles. Since the company now sells more cars in Europe than in North America or Asia, Model S deliveries in European markets are more important than ever.

Here’s our November 2015 look at Model S deliveries based on registration data in Tesla’s most important European markets:
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There’s been some concerns over the way Tesla is reporting the power output of its Model S, especially the Dual Motor version. Until recently, the company advertised the combined power output of both motors without accurately accounting for the limitations of the battery pack.

This resulted in the Model S rarely, if ever achieving the advertised horsepower. After several complaints from owners, CTO JB Straubel wrote a blog post explaining the logic behind Tesla’s calculations, but some owners in Norway still moved forward with formal complaints to the local consumer protection agency.
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Tesla Motors is set to release by early next week the number of Model S’s delivered during the third quarter 2015. Tesla’s sales are an important metric for the short and mid-term future of electric vehicles. Like any other industry, the automotive industry is driven by profit-making.  If an automaker solely manufacturing electric vehicles, like Tesla, can show growing sales while maintaining favorable profit margins, there is no better motivator for the incumbents to accelerate their electric vehicle programs.

Lets take a quick look at Tesla’s sales so far this year:
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[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2nfd7HrJ60]

In case you are wondering, that Yugo-looking EV is called the Buddy EV. The Norwegian electric vehicle’s range is 25-60 km  (16 to 37 miles) via a 13 kW motor, and has a max speed of 80 km/hr (50 mph) while under 100 inches long.

No wonder the Tesla is doing so well in Norway.

Facebook via InsideEVs
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