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Comment by hurrdurr | Hacker News Reader

This is a repeat of a prior Tesla publicity stunt. What they do is they only ship cars to Norway quarterly, and by filling a big backlog of orders they then claim to be the most popular make in that month, which is technically true but also quite silly. You can clearly see on the graph in the article that the reason Tesla "sold" a ton of cars in September is because it sold almost none in August and July prior. And Tesla has been pumping this PR trick for at least four years.

I think this says more about Tesla's bizarre production and delivery schedules than it says about the automobile market in Norway.

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Genuinely curious why you assume this is a PR stunt vs. say, a logistics related thing. The effects of such a PR stunt are likely negligible vs. potentially losing out on hundreds or thousands of sales due to long and unnecessary waiting times.

> The effects of such a PR stunt are likely negligible

Marketing is most likely the most important thing for new products nowadays. Quality becomes secondary if your target group thinks they get the best even though they don't.

That said, if you walk around Oslo you really do see quite a lot of Teslas on the road; it's noticeable.

Tesla is also subsidized by government, so it costs pretty much the same as a "general" kind of family car.

Technically they are not subsidized, they are just not as heavily taxed as combustion engine cars.

They arent subsidized. Internal combustion vehicles are disincentivized with taxes. Externalities internalized.

Well, not really. The hefty taxes on ICEs have been there always to provide income for the state, they were not introduced to internalize any environmental effects. In particular this holds for the 25% VAT which EVs get to skip, which you otherwise pay on anything from bubblegum to burglary alarms.

The thing that irks me about this subsidy (or whatever you call it) is how ineffective it is. Something like $5000 per tonne CO2 avoided, if uou make some optimistic assumptions, which is 50-100x more expensive than most sensible emissions reduction methods. Adding insult to injury, total emissions from cars are growing, i.e. EVs lead to people driving more in total, not driving less in ICE cars. It's just greenwashing, pure and simple.

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