Norway is a very special case in that it has massive hydro energy resources and nobody lives there.
Compare a country to a state if you want to be honest.
Their hydro energy company is an aluminum company company, they have so much slack power they export it refining bauxite.
It is worth repeating solar panels covering an area about the size of NH generate enough power to supply all current entire US energy needs.
Out of interest, do you mean 6% of cars on the road of 6% of new cars sold last year?
I think for much of the population a brand new EV is simply too expensive.
As alliao says, this is partly because of the way road user charges (RUC) currently work, though that is slated to change in the future.
They’re mostly big, and compete with 20mpg models. At $4/gallon, you’ll spend $40K on gasoline to drive a new ICE car 200K miles. The EV premium is typically $10-20K. These are all luxury cars, so a trimline upgrade is often $10K.
EVs have particularly poor resale value (the technology improves rapidly), so if you’re price sensitive you can get a much better deal by buying something a few years old.
In places where competition is allowed, EVs are much cheaper than ICE. That’ll eventually be true in most places. If NZ lets the Chinese models in, I’d expect them to take over immediately.
I can't imagine why NZ doesn't allow Chinese EVs in already like Australia has. I would guess it isn’t really about restriction but rather the smaller size of the market.
Although curiously, Nissan has stopped selling us the Leaf.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/oct/16/plug-in-...
https://electrek.co/2026/02/19/biggest-study-yet-shows-plug-...
Without tariffs, the excellent and inexpensive Chinese electric cars might be an attractive option.
That is irrelevant unless Norway has unused capacity.
If a country adds electric cars using more electric power, then what really matters is how that extra power is generated.
It gets weird in Europe because adding extra load in Norway could easily mean that Poland does more generation using coal.
I'm in New Zealand where the government owned generators are preventing solar installations. One example was via an unobvious regulation that the installation had to handle massively overengineered earthquake rules. Meanwhile we use coal or imported gas when the isn't enough rain for our hydro. And we waste about 10% of our total capacity exporting (via one aluminium plant).
What is a hydro energy resource, a river? Don't lots of countries have rivers?
(If we're talking about hydroelectric power plants they've chosen to build, that's not exactly a resource -- and other countries could choose to build those too, right?)
Some big slow moving river in a flat land on the other hand is not helping you here.
A river winding along a flat plain is not a hydro energy resource. A river in the same valley as your capital city is not a hydro energy resource.