Norway is far ahead of other countries when it comes to Electric Vehicles (EVs) and Hybrid cars. The Norwegian Road Federation (OFV) reported that EVs and Hybrids cars accounted for 52 percent of new-car sales, making Norway the country with the largest EV segment market share of new car sales, ahead of Netherlands, Sweden, China, France and United Kingdom, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA). This may sounds contradicting, as the country’s wealth is largely based on fossil fuels.

“No one else is close in terms of a national share of electric cars. For the first time we have a fossil-fuel market share below 50 percent”, said to Reuters Oeyvind Solberg Thorsen, chief of OFV.

The sales of electric and hybrid vehicles has been helped by Norway’s generous subsidies, introduced for the first time in the 1990s to help local carmakers, and which are now helping the country to shift from fossil-fuel engines. Norway set the ambitious goal that by 2025 all cars should be zero emissions, a target that seems reasonable considering the current sales rate, but that those incentives will remain untouched in the next years. In 2017 the Norway’s right wing attempted to remove a one-off tax exemption for new electric cars weighing more than two tonnes, a proposal later dubbed as “Tesla tax”.