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Comment by Expez | Hacker News Reader

The Tesla isn't priced as a luxury car in Norway. Electric vehicles are exempt from taxes and fees, which is mostly where the money goes when you buy a more traditional vehicle. They also don't pay anything when passing toll booths, IIRC. Where I grew up, people now pay ~$10 just to pass toll booths to and from work every day.

There are other benefits as well, like free parking, Tesla's free charging station--and most importantly for many--you get to drive in the lane reserved for buses and taxis instead of dealing with traffic to and from work.

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All of this is indeed correct. People here don't buy Teslas or other electronic cars because of the environment. Most do it for the economical reasons listed above [1]. However there has been a lot of discussion recently about whether these economical advantages are here to stay. Currently the electric cars are clogging up the bus/taxi lanes and the government is losing money as a result of the electric car boom we've seen here recently [2]. It will certainly be interesting to see what removing the advantages will do to the electric car market in Norway.

[1]: https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=no&tl=en&js=y&prev...

[2]: https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=no&sl=no&tl=en&u=h...

The clogging of the bus lanes because of electric cars is mostly wrong. It's been a lot in the news, but no one has proven it. They all just point to the correlation of more electric cars in the lanes. Not the correlation with more traffic in general.

The clogging happens because every car wanting to get on or leave the highway has to cross the bus lane. It's easy to see for yourself.

I don't live in Oslo so I can't comment on the situation there (or anywhere else for that matter), but in Kristiansand the EVs are a very real issue in the bus lanes. Granted, the bus lanes weave in and out of the general lanes so congestion in the general lanes is the root of the problem for sure.

That's a classic "Tragedy of the Commons" scenario. The electric car benefits are great when only a few are on the road, but when everyone gets one it turns into a problem.

That will become a problem in the US as well, since US highway construction and maintenance is mostly funded from motor fuel taxes.

Highway maintenance is already a problem in the US, but not because of electric vehicles, it's from increasing efficiency of fossil fuel vehicles and the political refusal to raise fuel taxes to balance the maintenance costs with the tax revenue from fuel. If electric vehicles do become a significant proportion of vehicles on the road, the pragmatic thing to do would be to charge for mileage based on the odometer and vehicle weight.

How is the odometer data supposed to be collected? Weight is easy, though. I guess you could let the car phone home a couple of times per year, but the consumer still owns the car and can do a lot of shady stuff with the odometer, I imagine. Better to just use a flat annual fee with modifiers for weight. Trucks and other business vehicles can be assumed to travel a lot, so higher taxes for them.

I think the car-to-car variation in annual mileage traveled is too wide to fairly assess an annual fee. A secured odometer box checked during periodic vehicle inspections would be enough to reasonably raise the bar on mileage, but unfortunately more invasive solutions always seem to get suggested - e.g. GPS monitoring of mileage, or pervasive license plate tracking etc...

The last benefit actually is starting to become a problem, since so many people have gotten Teslas. There's a lot of traffic in the bus lane, as electric cars, buses and taxis fight for the same spaces.

I suppose it will eventually be taken away. It's a nice temporary incentive but it obviously cannot scale.

Just like California is issuing very few carpool stickers for hybrid cars. It's like a lottery that bumps the value of your cars 5 grand up.

True, it's an economy car for well-off people here really. In Bergen it's now easier to spot Tesla than a Ford Focus.

With incentives like /that/ I too would buy a Tesla.

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