Comment by noelrock | Hacker News Reader

Comment by noelrock | Hacker News Reader

Norway has been leading the pack in this regard for quite some time. A few Government incentives, both financial and for instance the ability to use dedicated bus lanes (now discontinued in Oslo I think?) majorly helped.

One of the large issues around uptake is simply infrastructure. Here in Ireland, it is still patchy at best. We had an EV (Nissan) from around 2016 but gave it up in 2020 as there was simply too much anxiety around out of service public chargers and lack of backup. Range anxiety is definitely possible to overcome, but it requires the state to back it up with resources: Norway has most definitively done this.

Final thought: no surprise that ID.3 is making inroads in a huge way on sales. It's a sweet spot of a good car at an attainable price that looks, for want of a better word, 'normal'. Some EVs seem to be designed 'differently' almost for the sake of it - and while some will love that, it ends up adding another hurdle for a certain segment of the market I believe.

You can still use the bus lanes in Oslo and in teh rest of Norway. :) I live here, but it also says on Statens Vegvesen site: (in Norwegian): https://www.vegvesen.no/trafikkinformasjon/langs-veien/trafi.... It's nice to avoid traffic jams. :)

I drive occasionally and the first time I drove an electric last year, I barely made it to a charging station an hour outside Oslo and not close to another city. I had to wait a couple of hours before hopping to a fast charger. I treated it like a gas car, but after that, I changed both my attitude and a number of driving habits to get the most of them. I am happy the wide breadth of support across the country is available to maintain charging stations. Just on cost alone, I would prefer electric for rentals.

Many thanks. Was there a change in perhaps the hours they could be used, or was it floated perhaps at one stage? I’m nearly certain I read it more than once maybe 3-4 years ago.

Edit: I found a link about it - https://www.thelocal.no/20150506/norway-strips-electric-cars... - perhaps it has since been reversed again?

> EVs seem to be designed 'differently'

This is mostly because aerodynamics become very important in an EV, and weight becomes (relatively) less important.

That changes substantially many design decisions, affecting a lot of things you might not expect - dramatic changes to the visual appearance, focus on AC rather than a sunroof, internal airflow changes to prevent fogging, etc.

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