DATA STORY: Shifting gears to electric vehicles - How Norway is leading the charge through its rising number of Tesla cars

American electric car maker Tesla has been in troubled waters recently due to backlashes faced by their Model 3 electric car. But the pioneer in electric car technology is not an easy bait, and will fight its competitors, among which are:

Norway features among the world’s top 15 oil producing countries and quite understandably about 12 percent of its GDP comes from the petroleum sector. An economy like that, apart from exports, relies on a sustained domestic demand of oil consumption to stay away from troubled waters.

However, if you were to drive around Oslo, apart from the city’s hustle bustle and the captivating scenery in the distance, lanes of Tesla cars and other electric vehicles will be hard to miss.

Norway is fast shifting to electric vehicles from petrol and diesel ones despite being a fuel-sufficient economy.

Over 33 percent of new cars sold in Norway are either fully electric or are plug-in hybrids, which is more than 10 times than what the US has at present.

Today, Norway has the highest per capita number of all-electric cars in the world: more than 100,000 in a country of 5.2 million people.

How electric cars became popular in Norway            

Managing ambitious emission-reduction targets besides not affecting the business was a task and hence Norway opted to popularise electric vehicles among the people through incentives.

The Norwegian government made all electric cars exempt from the country wide car-purchase tax and even the 25 percent sales tax that is applicable on nearly all Norwegian goods.

Apart from this, the government allowed electric car drivers to plug in and charge their electric vehicles for free at municipal power points, banished tolls for them and permitted them to use bus lanes to avoid traffic.

According to data analytics firm Statista, Norway has about 6.3 Tesla superchargers per million of its people while the US – a major car market has about 1.2.

Source: Statista

This has bode well for electric car manufacturers. Especially for Tesla, who sold about 4000 cars in Norway in 2015.

Norway is now the second biggest market for Tesla cars after the US. The Scandinavian country aims to phase out go all fossil-fuel powered cars by 2025 as the world moves toward cleaner ways to commute.