Almost all new cars sold in Norway last year were fully electric, according to official registration data published Friday. It puts the Nordic country within touching distance of effectively erasing gasoline and diesel cars from its new car market. “2025 has been a very special car year,” Geir Inge Stokke, director of the Norwegian Road Traffic Information Council, said in a statement.
Can anyone from Norway comment on this? I would tend to suspect the reason is perhaps language barriers or all the news about quality control issues for Teslas and all the evil Musk is doing hasn’t made its way to Norway but the problem with this idea is based on my very limited experiences with Norwegians they all know excellent English like native level and likely better than a lot of Americans actually and would be very informed about this. Maybe despite this it’s just not reaching them over there.
Maybe someone could start translating articles about all the evil things Musk has done and all the quality and reliability and safety issues with Teslas into Norwegian and do more outreach to Norway to help Norwegians pick safer and better EVs instead of Tesla and stop funding fascism.
Norwegians are well aware of what Elon is doing. I think it’s a combination of multiple factors:
A lot of the difference from other countries is probably explained by that due to tax incentives, there are a lot of people in Norway buying electric cars who do not fit the usual demographics of electric car buyers.
I tried the new Volvo EX30 which I believe is Chinese made, compared to my EX40 which is not. What a huge difference. The 30 felt so cheap in every aspect. Didn’t even have a speedometer behind the wheel. I had to look at the middle display for that shit. Imagine looking to the middle of the car all the time. It was awful. Felt unsafe. All the buttons felt flimsy and didn’t have markings to show what they did. No physical buttons to control anything. Weird controls for controlling the back windows.
The glove compartment is opened from a menu like two to three clicks down. Instead of a lever like on mine.
The driving feel was terrible. The list goes on. Just, everything about it sucked.
I really hope the EX60 will be better, but I’m gearing up for disappointment.
They’re a newer industrial power and still at the lower end of manufacturing prowess, basically.
Like, you can find high-end manufacturing in China, but not at the same scale. For most performance stuff they import from the West, like everyone else.
And a good deal of the parts were manufactured in China, with a spec which didn’t request trash.
Depends. If it’s a jet engine, the wires might ultimately trace back to China, and the aluminum in the faring. The more demanding parts will be made in the West, though. Otherwise there’s no reason not to assemble in China as well.
If the specs are really tight it might be harder to find someone over there who can meet them, basically, and I would guess the ones who can are in high demand and not that cheap.
Okay, sure, I was thinking cars and consumer products, not aerospace.
With more limited volume products like jet engine parts the savings of manufacturing in a lower cost country probably also diminish. There’s a constant overhead in outsourcing things to somewhere far away, and without enough volume to spread that cost over it doesn’t always make sense.
Plus they probably can’t outsource a lot of the stuff being made for the military, so there has to be domestic manufacturing capabilities for that sort of thing anyway.
Yeah, consumer products are usually easier, although there’s exceptions. Cutting edge semiconductors are the obvious example, but China has also struggled for a long time with the humble ball-point pen and it’s tiny, ink-spreading ball bearing.
My view about Chinese manufacturing is that they make things to spec. If the spec says cheap garbage, you get cheap garbage. If the spec says more premium stuff, you get that.
In my experience, the main indicator of whether something will be garbage is not the country it was manufactured in, but whether the target demographic is Americans. If it’s destined for an American retail store or webshop, it will be cheap trash. There are exceptions (as much as I hate their OS, Apple hardware is pretty nice), but generally American businesses will trade quality for margin almost every time.
There was a period where more or less all car manufacturers, regardless of country, were abandoning physical buttons and levers, and that trend is thankfully reversing. The Tesla Model 3 at some point had buttons for turn signals, and one was above the other, so you had to memorize which was in which direction. I believe The shifter was also on the touchscreen. The Cybertruck famously turns into a doorhandle-less cremation chamber in case of fire. I’m not sure I’d blame Chinese ownership/manufacturing for what appeared to be a global trend.
Considering the Volvo, I don’t think they’ve had a major shift in the market demographic as far as I know. Here in the home country of Volvo, the XC60 is like the most popular car. And they suddenly turn to shit right as the switch to Chinese manufacturing starts? (At least a Chinese platform.)
I thought I heard something about the US banning Chinese-made products and goods? So that, if true, would make the market even smaller in the US, which shouldn’t influence the quality in that way you say. But maybe other markets are also willing to compromise on quality.
Yeah, those two first paragraphs were more about Chinese manufacturing in general, not about the Volvo. The US is still full of Chinese-made stuff, it’s just a bit more expensive now. And there are no BYD cars, but as far as I know you can still get Volvos.
You forgot the biggest reason, people are ok with supporting a fascist
There are people ok with supporting a fascist worldwide, that doesn’t explain why the Norwegian ones are buying more Teslas. Tax incentives do.
Tax incentives explain why people in Norway buy EVs. Tax incentives do not explain why Tesla is by far the most popular car brand in Norway and has seen no decline in sales, while Tesla sales have plummeted in the rest of Europe.
I did give a bunch of other reasons earlier in the thread, which are logically consistent. “Norwegians are fascists” doesn’t line up with the political reality in Norway, no matter how much some passionate people on the Internet want it to.
Tax incentives apply to all EVs. Not just Teslas. The fact that the company openly supports antidemocratic and anti-European policies, has lead to a decline in sales in most of Europe. The fact that Norwegians still buy Teslas at the same rate as before means that they are choosing to support these American policies. I don’t care wether it’s fascist or not, but it’s certainly opposed to a rules-based international order (which small countries like Norway are reliant on for their independence), it’s against democratic principles like free elections and separation of powers, and it’s against your own economic interests.
Of course tax incentives apply to all EVs. I don’t think my point is coming quite across here. These aren’t the tax incentives you’re likely used to.
In the US, tax incentives for EVs amount to you getting a $3k or something like that discount on your electric car. Electric cars are more expensive to manufacture, so the incentive roughly cancels this out, so people who wanted to buy an electric car can afford to do so instead of buying a comparable ICE vehicle for roughly the same price.
This is not how Norwegian tax incentives for EVs work. Norway has a tax on combustion engines. The bigger the engine, the higher the tax. EVs do not have combustion engines, so this tax does not apply to them. The result of this tax structure was that ten years ago, a Tesla Model S was the price of a VW Golf in Norway. That was while people still bought Golfs. It’s hard to compare now because everyone buys EVs.
In every country there are assholes. Some vehicles appeal more to assholes. While there certainly are assholes driving a Prius, you’re more likely to see them in a Hellcat, an F1 Raptor or some huge diesel truck. If you wanted to buy one of those in Norway, you’d have to sell one of your mansions. If you don’t want to sell a mansion, or don’t have multiple mansion money, you buy a Tesla Model S or X. In most other countries assholes drive a variety of cars. The asshole market in Norway is 100% dominated by Tesla, and assholes don’t mind that Elon is a nazi.
If you want to compare with other countries, you’d get more meaningful results if you took another country’s data, substituted all performance ICE cars with Teslas, and then compared the results.
This isn’t the only reason. I listed a bunch of other contributing factors in my original comment. I forgot to mention the extensive Tesla supercharger network in Norway, but that probably also plays a role. I’m pretty sure other vehicles can also use those chargers, but it’s probably less convenient.
I live in Norway. I’m well aware of how the tax incentives work.
The plurality of Norwegian new car buyers are choosing to support Trump’s policies monetarily by buying Teslas. They are aware of the political positions of the company and they’re still choosing to buy the cars. In my opinion, none of your excuses can justify this.
Yes it does, it jist means there are more fasciat sympathisers in Norway per capita then most other places.
No, that’s just an excuse.
Sure, that lines up great with how half the countries in the west are drifting towards fascism, while Norway is still a rock solid social democracy. I guess the fascists in Norway are too busy driving their Teslas around to vote?
Check Australian car forums. Chinese EVs are TEMU cars. They seem fine for YouTube tests but they are built as bad as anything from Stellantis.
@SaveTheTuaHawk @bus_factor and not better than European cars 🫨
I made no comparison with European cars. I was merely explaining why a lot of Norwegians aren’t even considering BYD, which is Tesla’s largest competitor.
I’ve seen a bunch of VW ID.3 and ID.4 in Norway, and VW and Audi are pretty big there in general, so I’m pretty sure they’re aware of European cars 🙄
This. Even if you don’t word probably made it’s way to you about the Musk-Trump relationship, at the very least - the rest of the world pays a lot more attention to US news than vice-verse.
I am Norwegian and I don’t understand it either.
News of Musk’s evil shit is definitely coming here and we know how big of a turd he is.
I guess the people who buy Teslas think it doesn’t affect them at all so they don’t care. Or they think that the cars and the man should be considered separate things. “Everything doesn’t have to be political.”
Stupid.
I’m German and it still mystifies me. It’s really hard to explain why most other European countries got the memo that Musk, and by extension Tesla, sucks, even though e.g. Germany or France definitely have a lower average English proficiency than Norway.