It is the top EV market.
> I figure most other countries will be the same.
Most other countries are not Norway, it is a very wealthy, tiny market (150 K vehicles/year) with lots of hydro and not representative of the typical vehicle market in Western Europe and definitely not representative of the situation in the rest of the world.
EVs are the future, there is no doubt about that. But that future will not arrive everywhere at the same point in time and Norway is very far ahead of the rest of the world due to a fairly unique set of circumstances: exporting your own oil and gas to be able to have a 'clean' (and up to recently heavily subsidized) transportation network is in a way just a gigantic bookkeeping trick.
How so?
If every oil exporter used some of their oil revenue to switch to EVs, that would, all things equal, hasten the transition to EVs. The U.S. is not doing that.
Saudi Arabia started moving the electrical system to renewables where USA is doubling down on fossil fuels.
Saudi Arabia is the drug dealer that knows you don't consumer your own supply unless you must were the USA consumes the crack they sell.
My next vehicle will 100% be pure EV, not Tesla.
So true. There's nothing incompatible at all with: a) realizing that earth has gifted you with a valuable but limited & polluting energy source b) realizing that you'd be foolish to get you own country hooked on it, but it's not a bad business if you can get other countries hooked on it.
Instead we get oil rich areas seemingly determined to show off how much of their oil they can waste.
The US’s interest in the Middle East oil is a lot about stabilizing oil prices. At least it used to be when there was a rational policy and competent executors.
The US has vast reserves of coal and natural gas. We generally don't use oil to generate power either -- oil is something like 0.4% of the total power generated, because we have vast amounts of natural gas and coal to use instead.
The situation isn't the result of some crafty master plan on the part of the Saudis. It's jusut what makes sense.
As other countries move to reliance on Chinese rare earth processing for renewable technology, it drives their oil and gas consumption down which means more oil and gas for those who are still using it.
If you really want to look at this analogy about drug dealers then really what you see is that America is the big boss here and an energy and military super power, and Saudi Arabia is just another dealer under American protection and if they don’t do what we tell them to do they’ll get the boot.
The premise is all things aren't equal. The oil Norway would have used just gets used somewhere else so what difference does it make what Norway does instead. I don't know if that's the reality of the situation but if it is just an offset, it does sound like a bookkeeping trick doesn't it?
Norway exporting oil increases oil supply, but doesn't increase consumption. The world's oil consumers are not supply-constrained; the producers are not running at 100% capacity, and they'll happily pick up the slack if Norway just stopped exporting oil for no reason. And there's a large amount of consumption that can't be offset by electrification in the first place (petrochemicals, long distance flight, etc) so there's not even a theoretical future end-state where they require a non-EV-using counterparty to buy their oil to fund their EV usage.
Calling it a "bookkeeping trick" is just verbal sleigh-of-hand.
Consider if others followed their lead. Then oil would be used less for transportation, one of its most destructive and singular uses, and more for manufacturing or medical or less wasteful uses.
Speaking of bookkeeping tricks: Kneecapping renewable energy (wind), cancelling the EV future in the US, and then starting a war in the strait of hormuz will someday be acknowledged as the finest moment of the oil industry, maximizing profit in the face of all reason.
And across Europe BEVs are also about twice as popular as PHEVs. In 2025 2.6 million BEVs were sold in Europe compared to 1.3 million PHEVs. It seems the biggest deciding factor is how good the public charging network is.
Sources:
https://bilmagasinet.dk/bil-nyheder/hvor-mange-elbiler-er-de... (Danish)
https://bilmagasinet.dk/bil-nyheder/saa-meget-steg-salget-af... (Danish)
https://www.tradingpedia.com/forex-brokers/global-demand-for...
per-capita or by total volume? i ask because a sibling or child comment says that the number of cars sold in norway is pretty small (in part because the population is small). a quick google says 180k cars sold in norway in 2025 (we can round up to 100% EV) and 34M sold in China. It also says China has 50% EV sales. So by total volume Norway isn't close to the top.
Not really. Even in a hypothetical future where all road vehicles are electric, we'll still need fossil fuels for a while. For one thing, it's probably going to be a while before airplanes can go electric. And production of plastics will probably need petroleum for a long time.
https://personal.ems.psu.edu/~pisupati/ACSOutreach/Petroleum...
Admittedly this data is a little old (20 years), but today's numbers probably aren't that different. It shows, out of US petroleum production, that only 47% is used for gasoline. 8% is used for jet fuel, 22% for diesel and heating oil, 5% for coke, 3% for asphalt, etc. 53% is not a "rounding error".
Most countries are quite poor and/or have small populations and aren't buying many vehicles period.
About ~45% of countries have smaller populations than Norway, and Norway is in the top ~25% of countries by size of the auto market...
Most countries are not the China and India, yet they make up almost 45% of the global population.
The US and China make up about 45% of the auto market...
There's a lot of European, Asian, and Latin American countries that have more in common with Norway than they do with the US or China or India.
(Personally I am fine driving a 10 year old shit box because for me it is just a means of going from A to B and rather spend my money on other things)
For automobiles, the future comes very slowly.
That was true five years ago, but no longer-Algeria, the last country to allow it, banned leaded petrol in 2021 - https://www.bbc.com/news/world-58388810
AFAICT it would still be legal for the place on the bypass near me to sell leaded fuel but they don't because (a) the market is too small, not worth it and (b) as a result wholesalers don't offer the product, so if they wanted to sell it they can't get it anyway.
I was suffering every day I was driving it. Smog is insane everywhere.
