Why do they love electric cars in Norway? | Hacker News Reader

Why do they love electric cars in Norway?

bbc.co.uk

78 pointsm-i-l77 comments

Live here. My brother-in-law just bought the Leaf. From the people I talk to it is always the same reasons:

* price (leaf, vw etc)

and/or

* love Tesla: compared to any other new 400+ hp luxury car the Tesla is a steal for the moment both because of buying price (around 600' NOK for the entry level Model S is cheap compared to any other new sports car around here.)

and/or

* being allowed to drive in the bus lane

On top of this you save fuel, toll roads, park for free in a lot of places, get free ferry tickets etc etc. My former neighbours who drive for 40 minutes to and from work said not buying the Leaf would be failing basic math.

Edit: and lets not forget being allowed to drive in the bus lane.

The following incentives from the article seem key.

    - No purchase taxes

    - Exemption from 25% VAT on purchase

    - Low annual road tax

    - No charges on toll roads or ferries

    - Free municipal parking

    - Access to bus lanes

    - 50% reduction in company car tax

    - No VAT on leasing

Yet another story on how exemplary Norway is. Yet the reason Norway is able to provide these incentives is because they made a fortune selling oil. I'm conflicted on these Norway stories because while I applaud all of these efforts, the reality is that they are largely possible only because of oil money.

Not to mention, the Norwegians did a great job of investing the oil money wisely.

Most other oil -rich countries are plagued by corruption and/or short-term thinking. Norway, from day one, planned for the day when there would be no more oil money.

What makes you think that the oil has anything to do with it?

Really the connection between electric cars and oil is the long term thinking that both require, the kind of forward thinking that drove Norway to INVEST the tax income from the oil instead of SQUANDERING it as the UK did.

I lived the first 30 years of my life in the UK so I saw at first hand how it was done there and I've been in Norway now for another 30 years and this sort of thing is definitely handled better here (no it's not paradise but there seem to be fewer people trying to turn it into hell).

If there was a car that ran on tears of children and had 9 tax breaks you know they'd go for that one.

That's a very poetic way to describe the war-subsidized SUVs that many Americans drive.

Why do you consider SUVs "war-subsidized"? What's the reasoning?

Americas wars have often been in places that coincidentally favour their local business monopolies. "War is a racket" by Major General Smedley Butler is a good historical primer in this.

The wars in Iraq were fairly obviously related to the oil production in this area. If done because of that, then the 3 Trillion (that's trillion, with a T) spent on these wars is a subsidy of every oil user in the US.

I doubt that this model is sustainable. In Denmark, the tax exemption on electric vehicles is now being phased out because it got too popular and the resulting decrease in tax revenue would be to heavy.

Eh no. It got phased out because we got a government who don't believe in subsidising things that are good for the environment.

One of the support parties don't even believe that global warming is caused by human activity.

Cars are not good for the environment. Lifetime co2 footprint of electric cars are in the same ballpark as efficient petrol cars.

Depends a lot on how the electricity is generated. If most electricity is generated by wind and solar very different from if it was generated by coal.

And soon you won't have big daddy coal to kick around anymore.

I think I saw a heat map that showed the CO2 footprint of electric cars based on location. Here is one, there is a huge variation between states.

http://blog.wegowise.com/2012-06-26-your-cars-carbon-footpri...

The CO2 contribution from electricity is going to get better not worse, especially in states like California. California is hell bent to get off fossil fuels.

Even in the hypothetical case of clean electricity the lifetime co2 emissions are significant of resource intensive manufacturing, as roughly half of the lifetime co2 footprint happens in manufacturing phase.

Better than gasoline powered cars, but not order of magnitude better. So we still can't have everyone driving cars in the future.

It isn't intended to be sustainable, it's explicitly stated that these perks will go away in a couple of years.

One very small part of the arctic circle. That title is appropriate once electric cars are popular in the northern regions of canada and russia, who are by far the largest occupiers of the arctic.

Some data: It looks like the leaf's range is basically halved in cold weather. That, and the greater distances between everything in the true north, says to me that they are a long way from adoption.

http://www.greencarreports.com/news/1087587_what-does-it-tak...

Fyi, running the heater on a gas-powered car does nothing to the range. That heat comes from engine coolant. You are doing the engine a favor, something to remember if your engine is overheating.

> One very small part of the arctic circle.

I'm not sure where you get that from. I suppose you mean that there are areas in Canada that are as cold, and have a larger population - but not, as far as I know, as far north:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_Circle#Human_habitation

"The largest communities north of the Arctic Circle are situated in Russia and Norway: Murmansk (population 307,257), Norilsk (175,365), Tromsø (71,295) and Vorkuta (70,548). Rovaniemi (61,329) in Finland is the largest settlement in the immediate vicinity of the Arctic Circle lying slightly south of the line.

In contrast, the largest North American community north of the Arctic Circle, Sisimiut (Greenland), has approximately 5,000 inhabitants. Of the Canadian and United States Arctic communities, Barrow, Alaska is the largest settlement with about 4,000 inhabitants."

Tromsø has a relatively mild climate (record cold temperature in winter is ~ -18C, "usual" coldest days of January and February are around -10C). The north of Finland is much colder in winter due to being away from the warm ocean currents, as is inland Norway.

(Source: I grew up in Tromsø, and worked for a while as a city guide before I moved south to Bergen)

Yes, this is true. But I feel his statement stands. Like you say, Tromsø has really nice weather despite its northern location. Many Canadian and Russian cities reach ~-40C often enough. If the batteries have half the range in Tromsø, how are they in those cities?

It's telling that when Volvo made an electric car prototype (the C30 Electric), they gave it a separate ethanol heater to handle the Swedish weather conditions...

Electrical cars will never be popular in Russia, at least in the most parts. You have to drive at -40 temperature; you have to drive 500-1000km in one day; and not only drive, but keep warm temperature inside for passengers (not every day, but your car must be able to do that sometimes). You don't have enough money to buy many cars for different tasks, gasoline is extremely cheap (compared to Europe) and not much people care about ecology. Electric cars just don't suited for that.

They might become popular in Moscow and other huge cities with warm climate, short distances and rich people.

There are prototypes of electric cars that use aluminum batteries [1] with energy density similar to that of gasoline. As technology improves, that can be a viable option for extreme cold conditions.

[1] https://www.algemeiner.com/2014/06/17/israels-phinergy-tests...

> can be a viable option

To win the northern market, without massive subsidies, electric cars need to be better than viable. They need to be better than gas car. In cold weather, that will require an order of magnitude increase in energy density. That's a couple decades off imho.

The energy density of aluminum batteries is higher than that of gasoline as they essentially burn aluminum turning it into Al2O3. The problem is that they are typically not rechargeable making them very costly presently. But with right infrastructure they can be better than gasoline - putting aluminum bars into the car should be even easier/faster than pumping gasoline. And, as with gasoline, they do not loose energy when left in cold.

I assume your definition of 'never' extends.. 10-15 years into the future?

And then it is back to horse and cart?

Within a few decades, oil will no longer be available.

But Methane Hydrate will be plentiful for centuries!

> One very small part of the arctic circle.

Ok, we replaced "the article circle" with "Tromsø" in the title above. That should narrow it down a bit :)

cc. For map geeks, another slight error by the BBC was that the circle isn't an area but a line. Nobody lives on the circle. The normal phrase is 'above the arctic circle' or just 'in the arctic'. Canada has "the north" which is actually an official thing for tax purposes (extra deductions for the higher cost of living).

It's still not accurate. The article states they love electric cars in Oslo (30% adoption), but in Tromsø adoption is more muted because of the range problem. "Norway" would be the most representative title.

Oh, ok, but it's not nearly as fun. How often do we get to say Tromsø?

So basically it's incentives, inventives and incentives on top of incentives.

Wouldn't call that love but hey whatever it's still a good result, right?

Yes, a lot of incentives. But another important point is that they make some sense, due to the pervasiveness of renewable hydroelectric power in Norway. Being an oil producing country, we could have gone the other way, and just subsidized gasoline prices instead.

This part of subsidies (free charging) has been getting less expensive for the budget too, at least in nominal terms. The price of hydro-power exported to neighboring Denmark has dropped by almost 50% since 2010, as Denmark ramped up its wind mills, albeit also with subsidies.

https://apps.axibase.com/chartlab/ccca061b/2/

incentives + social pressure to make gas car owners feel guilty. One of the top reasons from the interview was "clean consciousness".

This, I think, is partially because oil is the main industry in the country so they collectively feel more guilty than neighboring Sweden and Finland.

> "clean consciousness"

Which just happens to work so much better when your electricity is not provided by coal plants...

As you say, it's better if you don't rely on coal for electricity production, but it's important to note, because there's lots of propaganda doing its best to suggest otherwise, that it's still a good idea if you're using coal.

Using coal is of course a ridiculous thing to do, and should be phased out immediately, but still, electric cars make sense even in that horrible scenario.

Sure, please wire us 100bn $ so we can phase it out!

Just take the money you would have to spend on people dying from the pollution, and the money saved from not having to do as much to reduce CO2 emissions and you're already ahead.

As a bonus, there will be less environmental damage and pension payments for the taxpayer to make good when the coal corporations go bust 'accidentally' leaving all their debts unpaid.

Those incentives didn't just happen. The Norwegians imposed them on themselves.

Any regulation is imposed by the people on itself in a democracy. When people complain about the internet provider in the US, they have imposed that to themselves too.

Anyway, the point is that electric car in Norway is not competing on equal footing. It is cool, don't get me wrong, but worthless as an indicator of things to come in other countries.

In 2012 someone made a great overview of EV history and incentives in Norway http://www.evnorway.no

Too bad it's not beeing updated any more.

The oil age is ending in Norway. It's considered a fact of life.

You all have heard of the petroleum fund. That money is going towards pensions. Of course it's easier to buy an electric car if you're used to thinkinf of the oil age that something that ends within your own working life.

> The oil age is ending in Norway.

With "oil age" you mean the use of oil, or its production?

Production. The North Sea reached "peak oil" some time ago.

Although there have been recent increases in production, the total output is much lower than it was around 2000.

http://www.crystolenergy.com/assessing-future-north-sea-oil-...

The oil age in Norway is far, far from over. In fact, I suspect Norway will still be producing oil into the year 2100 as long as there is a market for it world-wide. Cars aren't the only things on Earth that needs oil.

In terms of future expansion, one has to consider the unexploited oil reserves that Norway still has hidden in its sleeves. Take Lofoten, Vesterålen and Senja which hold about 1.3 billion barrels of oil. As a comparison, the UK's entire oil reserves is 21 billion barrels.

For now, the government has decided not to start exploiting this area. However, a lot can happen in 10-20 years time. There may also be other undiscovered oil reserves along the coast line.

Add to this, Norway claims 2.7 million sqm of Antarctica, about 20% of the entire continent. Let's hope the world never comes to the point where nations will argue over this continent because it would not end well. You can be sure there's a lot of oil hiding there, though. 203 billion barrels worth according to some wild speculations (I would not trust that number at all, but it is plausible that the number is high).

Largescale production.

Sheik Yamani, who was petroleum minister in Saudi Arabia and IMO very clueful, once said that at some point, the oil production will slow to a trickle and prices rise to $1k/barrel. There'll still be mineral oil in various fields, he predicted, but at some point the ones that can be exploited cheaply will have been emptied.

Thx for the clarification.

Demonstrating that tablet app for the Nissan Leaf perhaps isn't the best demonstration of great technology...

https://www.troyhunt.com/controlling-vehicle-features-of-nis...

I wonder how well EV's cope with arctic conditions. In areas near the ocean temperatures generally don't get too extreme (e.g. Anchorage), but inland they can easily get into ranges that must be challenging for batteries to cope with.

To mitigate issues with cold weather, 2nd generation Nissan Leaf battery packs with the 'cold weather package' include a 'battery warmer' between banks. This is controlled via the BMS which was already monitoring temperature with some thermistors. It's a resistive element like that used in heated seats or an electric blanket.

The Tesla battery is a liquid cooled battery and thus can be warmed via coolant that is heated by the inductive heater for the HVAC. Same for the GM Volt/Bolt.

I was also wondering about two things I've heard they have in northern climes called heated garages and engine block warmers[1]. I assume if one were charging a batter one could also divert some power to keep it warm. Lowered range aside one bonus of an electric car in cold climates is they'll probably start.

[1] As a Californian these things frighten and confuse me.

> I assume if one were charging a batter one could also divert some power to keep it warm

The Tesla is always diverting power to keep the batteries warm in the winter. In fact, if you park it outdoors in freezing temperatures, and plug it in to an American single-phase 120V outlet using a long extension cord, all the power will go to keeping the batteries from freezing and it won't charge at all.

Kinda conundrum there, you want good thermal coupling to the environment to shed heat when the batteries are charging. When the car is sitting in the cold you want the batteries insulated.

Perhaps bits of metal that can physically touch between the outside and inside (or not) as needed could help ?

Anecdotal, but I was speaking with a friend from Norway about 18 months ago, and he mentioned how you see Teslas everywhere because they are heavily subsidized and gas is ridiculously expensive. However, he said everyone also has a winter car, a Subaru or similar, because the electric range is so severely limited by the cold.

Not mentioned in the article, but hybrid vehicles are also quite popular in Norway - as they blend some of the benefits of gasoline and pure electric cars.

My tounge-in-cheek take on it is that people that shouldn't really need to own a car, because they're living in an urban area and should be able to use public transport, will buy a Tesla. People that live eg. a few hours outside of Tromsø, will generally buy a four wheel drive gasoline car. But some of these can be served well by hybrids too.

> However, he said everyone also has a winter car, a Subaru or similar, because the electric range is so severely limited by the cold.

Article seems to suggest otherwise — population of 5 million, but only 3 million cars on the road.

Hmm, maybe "everyone" in his context was really "everyone who has a Tesla". It's been a minute since that conversation, but the gist was that Teslas are popular because of subsidies, but cold-weather battery tech isn't good enough for an EV to be your only car in Norway, supposing you need a car in the first place.

Unfortunately, article doesn't really address that. Just some he-said she-said opinions.

Look up 'bjørn nyland tesla'.

It's most watched vlog about Tesla S by someone who lives in Norway. He used to live in Oslo but also lived in the very far northern part of Norway. He offers very detailed reviews of Tesla. Beautiful winter scenery of Norway is a bonus.

It's beautiful when you don't have to live it.

I live here and it is still beautiful. From May to early September it almost isn't dark at night and depending on where in the country you live it sometimes seems like living in a postcard ;-) (FTR, Norway is long, if you turned it upside down it would stretch far into Italy they say, driving from my place to the artic circle would be about 17 hours non-stop and then you still have a full working day left to drive to the nortmost point or the Russian border.)

I have lived for months as far as beyond the artic circle and have worked on the very northermost parts for shorter trips and I loved it all the way. (Although ski goggles and warm clothes are recommended to get anything done outside on a windy day in the winter.)

> I live here and it is still beautiful

Me too. Never been further north than Steinkjer though.

I can answer this question; because of tax benefits.

Norway is applying "the polluter pays" principle. A gas car has a lot of pollution therefore a lot of paying. Electric cars - not so much pollution, not so much paying.

If you travel to Norway, you see they have sea, mountains, and water, which means very cheap electric energy.

Probably the only place in the world with similar cheap electric energy/person is Iceland.

When I was in Iceland I could not stop thinking about the electric cars possibilities there. I have not lived in Iceland in winter though, which certainly will have more problems.

Unfortunately Norwegian power companies realized they could export electricity to other countries in Europe, so electricity is not as cheap as you might expect.

https://shareonline.in/category/vehicles/cars/

Combine incentives with enough purchasing power = profit.

I was feeling all good for Norway, till I read this:

> It helps that Norway is also the biggest oil producer in Western Europe and the world's third largest exporter of natural gas.

Hmmm.... You know what would really help the environment, Norway? If you stopped drilling all that oil and gas. Your measly consumption of gas isn't the problem; your mega export of oil is.

Imagine what would happen if they (we, I guess, since I live here).

The world is pretty connected - that is more obvious here than when I lived in the states. And most of the world's shipping, transport, etc runs on that. Simply stopping the drilling would cause disruption and aggression. It could easily fuel more fracking, for example, or more places using unsavory means to get the oil (My understanding is that they try to be as environmentally friendly as possible while drilling). In addition, it would, at this point, cause local harm to the folks living here and elsewhere. The oil profits are redirected to the oil fund, which are invested in different sorts of companies and helps others out as well as Norwegians, who use the interest from the fund to pay for various things.

To stop drilling, the gas consumption really needs to be attacked on a global scale. Renewable energies, electric cars, and such things everywhere - affordable to everyone.

In addition, 14 other countries produce more oil. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_oil_produ...

5 others produce more natural gas: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_natural_g...

At least some sort of effort is being made. Which is more than I can say for the US, which tops both lists.

It's not that simple. Natural gas emits around half the CO2 of coal per GWh. It really depends on what it's substituted with.

A more nuanced and interesting discussion would be if putting the money made from selling oil into kick-starting the EV industry (through subsidies, etc) a net ecological plus or minus?

Bit harsh, no? They have every right to participate in the global market and it sounds like they're rather forward looking.

Oil is needed for a lot of things other than burning it for energy.

Oh, come on. Yeah, we do make plastics and all, but the main use is for burning.

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