Tesla's $110,000 Model S is now Norway’s best-selling car
theglobeandmail.com
theglobeandmail.com
- No annual road tax and virtually no sales tax
- You're allowed to drive in the bus lane which is huge for suburb communters.
- Free communal parking
- Free passage through tolls and ferries
- Free charging at communal charging stations (they're everywhere in Oslo)
"Electric cars have been especially popular in Norway because of generous subsidies, free parking, government-provided re-charging stations, the right to use express lanes on highways and exemptions from tolls."
or wasn't that fragment there earlier?
Teslas high market share in Norway is also a symptom of some of the challenges we face here in Norway.
Of course, many of the world's capitals pale in comparison to cities like London or NYC...
- Three percent of all cars sold in Norway are electric, the same number in US is 0.1 percent.
- The number of electric cars on the Norwegian roads today is 7 000, and the total amount of cars is 2.4 million. The neighboring country Sweden has 4.4 million cars, but only 600 of those are electric.
- About 40 percent of those who own an electric car also own a gasoline car.
- The goal of the Norwegian Electric Vehicle Association is to have 100 000 electric cars in Norway within year 2020.
- The Norwegians have earlier tried to produce electric cars through the company Think Global. For the fourth time in twenty years, the company filed for bankruptcy in 2011.
Even better, that number is already outdated - the article states that the Model S has a 5.1% market share already.
It should be noted though that the Norwegians can afford to be environmental - they make ridiculous amounts of money from their offshore oil fields. Also, they have plenty of cheap electricity from hydro.
We can "afford to be environmental" the same way any country would be able to afford to be. The real difference is our wealth distribution which is leaps and bounds ahead of most of the world, here in Norway a higher percentage of the population are simply able to afford the car and that is what we're seeing in Tesla's market share.
Edit: About $9.30 per gallon (using 14.83 nok per liter in dollars per gallon via google)
GDP per capita 2012 for Norway: $99,557. US: 49,965. (Sweden: $55,244)
The last decade has been exceptional, though part of the reason is the NOK is vastly stronger against the dollar than it used to be (then again part of the reason for that is that the Norwegian economy is as strong as it is)
(EDIT: that's World Bank numbers, btw. IMF and other sources give slightly different results, but the relative difference is pretty much the same; if you factor in purchasing power parity, the gap is substantially closer, though)
That said, Norway is very smart. They correctly perceive that GDP from oil production isn't really income, but rather simply liquidation of assets. They know they can't afford to spend that money, so they save it (effectively turning it from one kind of asset into another).
My point was that the fact that Norway produces oil doesn't trivially lead to more people buying electrical cars.
Right now I couldn't have one since my apartment complex wouldn't support charging - however if the government ran a subsidy program to retrofit complexes I would definitely look at buying one!
And retrofitting apartments would be great, but again given the track record with the NBN rollout, you really have to ask how committed they are to infrastructure projects. Also brown/black outs happen during summer as the grid struggles to keep up with the increased demand. Adding EC to that? Yeesh.
Tangent: I'm all for EVs, but paradoxically they are really quiet - as in silent if they're coming up behind you. If you've ever been on the footpath, turned casually to cross the road only for a cyclist to rush past you out of nowhere it's really frightening like someone jumping out and yelling "boo". Can only imagine once we transition away from fossil fuels.
So if any government wants to embrace the use of ecars, this is one way to do it! Governments of countries with a healthy car industry would be hesitant to do this though.
In general it seems to me that internalizing all costs of transport is the way to go. This would mean higher fuel costs, possibly slightly higher cost of electric vehicles and also higher cost of public transport. There should be a clear incentive for people to move as close as possible to where they work, or to work from home. Some incentives to steer the economy in that direction could be helpful at first, for example subsidizing company housing or directly subsidizing people to move close to their job (the higher amount, the closer the family moves), offsetting high rent in places with lots of work.
Get the middle class into these electrics, if the rich want them there is no reason the middle class should subsidize their purchase
Making the rich move back to MB S-class and Porsche 911s and you take away at least part of the allure for the numerically larger upper-middle class.
Plus, realistically, do you really want to differentially encourage a $75 K/yr household to buy a car that's not economically rational/healthy for them to buy? You want more Teslas on the road via incentives? You have to give the incentives to the people who can afford them...
I'm really happy for them, but i believe that as soon as Mercedes Benz, BMW, Audi etc. can affort to make "cheap" but great electirc cars, nobody will talk about Tesla anymore.
In germany, for example, it's really expensive to own a car (insurance etc.) but it's even more expensive to drive one. You need to pay between 1,36 and 1,85 Euro per Liter (Cars have between 40-70 Liter tanks) and people _still_ don't buy electric cars.
My guess is, that many people trust those big companies and don't want to buy a expensive car from a company they never heard of. As soon as all those german companies have a good mass-product solution for electric motors, they can scale them from an Audi A1 to an Audi A7 and people will buy them instantly.
I highly assume they are ready for some tough times if they don't prepare for a changed market. Exports to the US and Asia won't save them forever. And once the infrastructure for EVs is in place it will become practical to drive EVs. I only hope for the German economy that car manufacturers learned the lessons from former German camera and TV set manufacturers.
Many similarities today. Incumbent manufactures mostly ignored (or produced paltry efforts) electric. Only now after the threat is getting established are they responding.
All cars will be electric someday and all manufactures will have electric cars (or be out of business). But until then, there is room for a new player to emerge. Honda, Toyota, Nissan weren't known before the last automotive disruption either.
People said the same thing about Google providing the first usable web search, and their dominance (and the Microsoft would eat their lunch when Redmond finally got around to it).
I feel the same way about Tesla - the Model S is merely a product that embodies the company's vision and skilled workforce. Tesla may not yet have a patent thicket, but they probably have key battery-specific patents as well.
They are busy disrupting the way cars are sold as well (mainly because, in order to succeed, they have to)… an area that sorely needs disruption.
All of this means that by the time the other manufacturers get around to building a Model S equivalent, Tesla will have both moved on to better product as well as entrenched their brand as the leader in the space (not to mention whatever lock-in that Supercharger stations produce).
Perhaps this will be diminished in Germany which prides itself on it's car manufacturers, but even Japan gave into the iPhone eventually.
Just look at non-apple laptops' trackpads...
You would think by now that Tesla would have been body-slammed by some regulatory agency or paid media shill (though that John Broder hit piece came pretty close)… maybe Tesla just has good defense in that space.
Wow, if that's correct, then good on both the government and people for trying to move in the direction of gasoline independence.
I guess in Canada and the US we are too intertwined with the car industry to do something similar.
Is it that people don't buy a lot of cars in Norway? Average income is significantly higher? Different income profile of car buyers specifically? Some kind of social effect, like prestige?
I guess people wanting a fast modern car would have to pay out their nose for one if its fossil fuel powered.
As opposed to selling exploitation rights to investors to enrich a kleptocracy.
According to Wikipedia, there are discussions about how much of the oil revenues should be saved; opponents of using more of them directly say that it would just lead to inflation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Government_Pension_Fund_of...
And that's before you take into consideration the annual savings due to high gas prices in Norway and no road tax on electric cars.
Add to this that electricity is cheap, while fuel is expensive. Also, Norway's wealth is relatively evenly distributed while at the same time the GDP is high. All these reasons makes it affordable for a lot of people to Buy a Tesla Model S.
While I have seen a few Model S on the road, I can't commute to job without passing a quite a few Nissan Leaf. Those have been sold in large numbers here (3% of all cars sold first half of 2013).
Our cost of living is often absurdly high though, and the increased wages can't completely make up the difference (it's AWESOME for travel though). Therefore we can't afford as much "stuff" as Americans can, but I think it's worth it due to increased quality of life the Norwegian system brings.
I visited Oslo a few years back, very briefly, and indeed it did seem like a very nice and well run place.
But no amount of nice social systems will buy you sunshine, so I'm still here in Italy.
The summer in Norway on the other hand is magical. I didn't realize what a huge privilege is it to be able to chill/drink beer/barbecue in the park the whole evening and watch the sunset at 23/11PM (or the whole night in the north of Norway) until I lived in Thailand for a year (where the sun always goes down around 18-19).
Sure, it's always warm there, but I really missed the long summer nights. Living far away from the equator has both its advantages and disadvantages.
It still seems bizarre to me that somebody would buy a car that is a third or even a fifth of their net worth, though.
But Norway also has almost 55K millionaires (net worth).[2]
1. http://www.businessnewsnorway.com/2011/10/norwegians-are-the...
2. http://www.theguardian.com/money/2007/jul/13/business.intern...
Yet my "fully loaded" tax bill in the UK and Norway came out at ~37% and 38% respectively, and at ~35% in California. This is everything paid by me: VAT/sales tax (at 25% in Norway, but since most people don't spend a huge proportion of their income on stuff where VAT applies, it doesn't contribute that much to overall tax paid), local government taxes/property taxes, wealth taxes, income taxes, as well as national insurance (compulsory part of healthcare/pensions etc.) and equivalents. When factoring in the need for private health insurance in California to cover things that are free at point of service in Norway and the UK, I'd break pretty much even on that respect. If you include payroll taxes etc. paid by employer, as some people like to do when they want to complain about tax levels, it might shift a bit bit further towards the US (but the UK and most European countries are at Norwegian levels there).
Some other US states would have left me a bit better off tax wise, though less than one might expect (but that's moot if I can't make the same salary or even find a job there). Then again, by that argument I could've substantially reduced my tax bill in Norway too by moving to the northernmost regions which have special tax breaks (or no income tax at all on Svalbard, but then I don't think there's many tech companies up there...).
The real outcome regarding tax level is "it depends" whether or not you can or want to live in the lowest tax areas and whether or not you can take maximum advantage of tax breaks (e.g. one thing that can drive Norwegian taxes down is that there's a number of things, including most loan interest, that can be deducted from gross income to arrive at taxable income, and this can make the tax rate paid by two people with the same salary vastly different; compared to the UK at least, the potential for deductions is far higher) and/or spend your money on things that are taxed at special rates.
But wealth is far more distributed in Norway as well (though that didn't apply in a like for like comparison of salary lie mine) so while we have fewer extremely rich people, unless you earn substantially above average elsewhere chances are you'd get a higher salary in Norway. This is a huge part of the reason Norway is so expensive: salary for low level staff in e.g. retail positions is far closer to the median in Norway than most places, and so contributes disproportionately to the cost of goods and services compared to elsewhere. For a majority of the population, this is sufficient to more than make up for tax and cost of living differences and leave them better off in Norway than most other places.
"Socialism" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism) isn't really applicable.