Almost all new car sales in Norway last month were EVs | Hacker News Reader

Almost all new car sales in Norway last month were EVs

qz.com

101 pointsjayantbhawal115 comments

> Norwegians pay higher taxes on cars they purchase that pollute, and lower ones on low and zero-emission cars. The country also taxes bigger cars more than smaller ones. EV drivers often pay lower parking fees and can use bus lanes, too.

The first two sentences make sense! Not the last one though. After driving an EV for a few thousand miles, ive realized they are so superior to ICE for my use case. I hate driving ICE vehicles in the occasions I still do now.

They're usually combo bus/taxi lanes. Do you think it doesn't make sense because busses should still be prioritized over private vehicles?

That’s my thinking, yes.

Anecdotally, it's not really an issue. I've never seen a bus hindered by EVs, and honestly most people don't even tend to use them anyway.

Yeah, I can’t get my head around that. Why do so many EVs sit in traffic when they don’t have to?

I mean, I don't live in the biggest city in Norway (Stavanger), but the places there are bus lanes tend not to be the places with the worst traffic problems. And there are roundabouts everywhere, with very few traffic lights, so traffic flows pretty well overall.

I wonder. Are people who aren't well off able to afford cars if nearly all cars sold are EV?

I think this is just about new car sales? Less well off can still by used ICE, which is what they would be anyway. Or even used Model 3 are in the low $20k USD here. Used Chevy Bolt are $10-20k, some leafs are cheaper.

A new Tesla and a Camry are about the same price, given the ICE taxes.

So no, many people can’t afford cars, but actually the EVs are the affordable options.

I just bought a second hand EV for 4k, cheaper than and ICE of the same age.

Old Leaf? What range does the battery have?

Depends on your definition of not well off.

I think the age of $1000 beaters is going to disappear. Just the raw metals in a completely dead EV battery are worth more if you recycle it.

Even more if it's only "dead" for EV use, there's still dozens of kilowatts of usable capacity for other uses as-is.

I just bought a 1 year old Nissan Leaf for $15,000 in San Diego California.

The aversion to EVs in the US is mostly just american idiocy.

In the US 2/3 of people live in single family homes. That means NEVER using a public charging station.

Most of those households also own more than one car. So it's easy to retain a ICE vehicle for when it's really needed.

Let's just face the facts, the Scandinavian governments, and the Scandinavian people are just smarter than americans...

p.s. I expect this car to pay for itself in ~5 years, due to savings on gas. How long before your ICE vehicle pays for itself? Like most long term investments, it requires a smarter population.

I think a lot of people are also radically overrating their likelihood of going on extended road trips. As the cost of even ICEs increases, I’ve known people to rent for a long drive rather than rack up the mileage on their personal vehicle (also if they can save on fuel economy) and I think more people are going to follow your lead in having a small EV for daily commuting to save money every trip, and maybe consider a rental if they actually decide to drive cross-country without stopping.

I priced PG&E electricity vs gas/hybrid, and gas/hybrid won. Especially because PG&E keeps increasing their rates.

That's the unfortunate truth about PG&E rates, though that's only true because the terrible external costs of gasoline pollution are not taxed and compensated. For almost everywhere else charging at home is 1/3 the cost of gas. Superchargers are also pretty comparable to a hybrid. As home solar and batteries gets cheaper and cheaper, that's also a backstop to limit the price increases of PG&E. Sort of.

> Let's just face the facts, the Scandinavian governments, and the Scandinavian people are just smarter than americans...

Citation needed. Norway has a population of less than the Bay Area, a massive sovereign wealth fund due to oil exports and is about the size of the average state in the US. I drive an EV but the state of charging infrastructure outside of CA is pathetic. I get why Americans don’t want to drive cars they can’t fill up on a roadtrip unless it’s a Tesla.

The median new car price is around $50k and you can get new EVs well under that amount. If we weren’t in a trade war, BYD would sell you an EV for the same price as the cheapest ICE options.

BYD (but not only) is heavily subsidised by chinese government.

https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2024/06/13/what-brussels-...

https://www.ifw-kiel.de/publications/news/chinas-massive-sub...

Sure, but they’re hardly the only manufacturer for whom that’s true (e.g. Tesla) and from a consumer’s perspective they might care more about their personal budget. Moreover, if we’re going to avert trillions in annual GDP losses due to climate change subsidizing electrification seems like a good idea.

How are Tesla subsidized by the government?

You know that $7,500 tax credit people got for buying their products? That’s the most obvious one but the bigger one is the carbon regulatory credits: governments require other car manufacturers to buy credits to offset their high-pollution vehicles, and since Tesla doesn’t make any of those they can sell something like half a billion dollars of them per quarter as pure profit. This has been most of their profitability in some quarters.

> You know that $7,500 tax credit people got for buying their products? That’s the most obvious one

The same tax credit applies to qualifying vehicles bought from any automaker. This has nothing to do with Tesla.

> the bigger one is the carbon regulatory credits

Again, every qualifying automaker can do exactly the same thing.

> China gave BYD $3.7 billion to ‘win’ the EV race.

That amounts to $1k per vehicle, way less than EU or US subsidies.

https://electrek.co/2024/04/12/china-gave-byd-an-incredible-...

Its only the new cars that are almost all EV.

In Oslo, the bus lanes on the highways are only accidentally available to EVs currently.

They were open for years as a means to foster EV adoption. But once sales took off, the local government tightened the screws — you needed an EV and also at least two people in the car to get access to the bus lane.

But! When they printed the new signs, somehow a double negative slipped through, and the text on the (many) signs said that you could only use the bus lane if you were driving alone in an EV. Obviously not the intent.

But currently, all the signs have the double negative condition crossed out, and all EVs continue to be able to use the bus lanes.

Ha, that’s funny! That’s similar where I am in the US too, early on there were EV exemptions to some carpool lanes, but that’s phasing out as EVs are normalized.

So, replacing erroneous signs is beyond the current state of technology ? As is proofreading before committing to metal ?

> So, replacing erroneous signs is beyond the current state of technology ?

From the GGP:

>>> But currently, all the signs have the double negative condition crossed out

If they crossed out both, they are back where they started.

I'm pretty sure that's not what was meant. (Do you really think it was, or are you just being snarky?)

Welllllllll.

Agreedish. In the US I don’t think I’d support higher taxes for non EVs because cars are unfortunately a necessity here and EVs are (mostly artificially through govt policy) expensive.

But yes to your point of ICE cars suck. They’re so much more impressive engineering than EVs but that complexity is also their downfall imo.

Could still tax based on weight to encourage people buying smaller cars. That’s how it works in many places.

I would be 100% in favor of this.

>Tax based on weight

Ooooohhhhh and that just makes all the EVs more expensive than they already are.

This is part of the reason why vehicles need to also be taxes based on pollution. But road-wear needs to be compensated too. It's worth mentioning that in the US, plenty of ICE vehicles weigh more than a typical EV. Honda Pilot, Toyota Sienna, etc.. etc...

Gas is already taxed.

Well. Yes but gas tax also goes for road maintenance which EVs don’t pay. Some states have increased the registration fees for EVs to counter this.

Almost all states with significant EV adoption have a special charge for EVs each year. What sucks is that it isn’t based on how much you drive, so if you aren’t using your EV to commute, you get charged just as much as someone using it all day for ride sharing.

Charging based on usage would require you to provide your mileage to the government, a tracker in your car, or some other privacy destroying method. I guess the government could just ask for your mileage and take your word for it, but that isn't reliable.

Car inspections that happen in most states do take count of your mileage fwiw I believe. However I also don't think charging based on "usage" makes sense here. Due to the jobs some people have, you may need to just drive a ton more and roads will need to be maintained either way however much you drive.

It’s coming eventually, once enough of the cars are EVs, flat fees aren’t going to be very viable if they don’t want people to game them. It’s not hard to read an odometer, it is hard to say where those miles were accumulated f you want to be really fare and get tax revenue to the state/place you were driving in.

In rural Ohio, the Amish use the roads for their buggies, but don’t pay tax. Wonder if they have registration fees for their buggies? I’ve never seen one with plates.

The gas taxes haven’t kept pace with inflation, though: we already have to heavily subsidize road maintenance with general fund revenue and to be an effective pollution reduction mechanism we’d have to raise it considerably, which is politically infeasible in most of the country.

Are evs taxed for road maintenance given they are much heavier?

Increasingly, so, and doing it by gross vehicle weight is the most fair since it also covers the guys buying heavy pickups as daily commuters.

>After driving an EV for a few thousand miles, ive realized they are so superior to ICE for my use case

I vastly prefer my low-ish end EV (Hyundai Kona) to every ICE vehicle I've ever driven. Even if I wasn't saving ~$100/month in fuel costs, and even if I the environmental effects were a complete wash, I don't think I'd ever buy an ICE again.

I think the only reason I'd ever go to an ICE vehicle is if I needed something larger. Right now, if you need a "family transport" vehicle with space for adults, kids, luggage, etc, the EV world is pretty limited. I had high hopes for the VW Buzz, but it's total range is a bit borderline for me, although I still need to calculate out how it would compare for my typical long distance drive. The Kona has greater range, but a much slower max charge rate, and it might turn out that those balance each other out, and the Kona has been fine for the 10 hour road trips I've done so far.

> a much slower max charge rate

Max charge rate is such a poor metric, as actual charge rate as a function of SOC varies so much between cars.

I'd like to see some standardized figure which is max average charge rate over 15 min, or perhaps minimum charge time for 30 kWh (~150 km range) or something along those lines.

My car has 120 kW peak IIRC, but I've never reached it. Once it's past 20% it has dropped to like 70 kW or something like that. And since I try my best to keep it above 20%, that 120 kW number doesn't mean much to me.

My sister has an ID.4 and it's the same story there. However I do know there are cars that are much better at this, able to sustain quite high charging rate up to or above 50% SOC.