If electric cars are so good, why is Norway having second thoughts about them?

Henry David Thoreau lived two years in a small log cabin that he had built with his own hands. He had a Harvard degree but survived on odd jobs and the vegetables he grew himself. Did he do anything worthwhile in his life? He made pencils. He also inspired a man named Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi with his ideas on civil disobedience. By extension, it seems, Thoreau might have helped Norway win the electric car race.If all goes well and lithium does not disappear from the planet in 2024, no new petrol or diesel car will be sold in Norway in 2025. Already, nine out of 10 cars sold in the country are electric. How did a country with no automobile industry of its own, and insane amounts of petro money, get here before the US? Long answers are complicated, so let’s just say it started with some Gandhigiri.A-ha moment The 1980s gave us Take on Me, one of the finest pop songs of all time. It is evidently still popular because its YouTube views have doubled from 1bn in the past four years. But like The Shawshank Redemption, it didn’t become a hit in one day. The 1984 version sank without a trace. It was only in October 1985 that the song became a global hit and its Norwegian band, A-ha, a phenomenon big enough to mess with the government.The story goes that A-ha attended the solar car race and exhibition called ‘Tour de Sol’ at Bern, Switzerland, in 1989. They found a red Fiat Panda that had been converted into an electric vehicle. The car looked like a cousin of the Maruti 800 and was only slightly larger. A-ha bought a copy of the car, brought it home, and started a civil disobedience campaign that eventually made Norway the friendliest country for electric vehicles.A-ha’s Panda was an absolutely impractical car. Its rear bench had been removed to make space for batteries, yet it could do only 45km on one charge, which took 48 hours — two days — from empty. But the band members had somehow read the future and were determined to push for EVs when none existed.Their Panda satyagraha involved racking up fines, says the BBC: “driving through toll booths, parking illegally and refusing to pay vehicle taxes, arguing that this new form of sustainable transport should be free to make it more attractive”.Every time the government impounded the car, they paid the fines, took it back and started again, “at least a dozen times”. medium nocaptionhttp://youtu.be/zburpq209JE?si=LRpWqoL9LGeieWOPMaking it easy for EVsThere’s no doubt that after a year of A-ha’s campaign, the Norwegian government started raining goodies for EV users, but by some accounts these incentives were also aimed at promoting domestic electric car startups like Kewet and Pivco.What were the incentives? The list is long, but removal of the purchase/import tax made new electric cars cheaper. Value added tax (VAT) on EVs was also removed. The cars didn’t have to pay any road tax, or toll charges or ferry fees (Norway has around 2.4 lakh islands). They could drive in bus lanes and park free. medium113660426Did sales jump?Not immediately, but that was because hardly any EVs were available in the early 1990s. Later, till about 2015, most electric cars were city runabouts with low power and range. Norway is a cold country, and some parts are so cold that people even now are opposed to the coming petrol/diesel ban. In the Finnmark region, for instance, temperatures below -25°C are common. In these conditions, an electric car loses 30-40% of its range because its battery also has to power the cabin heater. So, while 90% of new car sales across Norway are EVs, in Finnmark their share was closer to half last year.An unhappy resident told Canada’s The Globe and Mail newspaper: “In Norway, we’re living in our own world, a fantasy world. We are so rich we want to show how good we are.”According to a McKinsey report, only 10,000 EVs were sold in Norway between 2008 and 2011. Even in 2014, just 1% of new cars were EVs. But the picture changed rapidly after 2016. By 2022, 78% of new car sales were “pure electric”, a year later their share had risen to 87%.Current scenarioNorway recently crossed an important milestone. It has 28 lakh private cars, and 7,53,905 of these run on petrol while 7,54,303 are powered by batteries. The rest include diesel and hybrid cars. However, with almost all new cars being battery powered, the share of EVs will now increase rapidly. medium113662254 medium113662270Three factors have played a role in this transformation. One, the government incentives that followed A-ha’s campaign. Two, the availability of good electric cars with a good range. And three, the rapidly expanding charging system. For example, Norway’s capital Oslo has 2,000 free chargers.You will find a fast charger every 3.5km, on average, while driving the 1,700km from Norway’s north to its southern tip.Also, because more than 90% of Norway’s electricity is hydel — and the rest wind-based — the electric car transition is truly eco-friendly. The cars have not crashed the grid because most people charge them at home at night, when electricity demand and rates are lower. medium113662300Why second thoughts now?After achieving what other countries can only dream of, why is Norway beginning to withdraw benefits for electric cars? The problem is that cars, whether electric or not, cause urban congestion and make cities less liveable. The shift to electric cars was necessary to curb air pollution, and it has worked. The New York Times says, “Oslo’s greenhouse gas emissions have fallen 30% since 2009.”But EVs have not necessarily replaced conventional cars. A Vox analysis shows that in many cases, EVs were a family’s second or third car. Which means many of the benefits offered on them were going to the wealthy and worsening the rich-poor gap.While its neighbours Denmark and Sweden encouraged public transport, Norway’s cities followed the car-centric American model, and as car use grew, the incentive for investing in public transport reduced.But Norway wants to change that. It wants more and more people to walk, cycle and use public transport, and so the incentives for electric cars are being removed. The NYT says Oslo wants to reduce “the number of cars by a third to make streets safer and free space for walking and cycling”. Thoreau and Gandhi would have approved.