Cars are not going away, there is one statement that ensures it:

As public transport improves, traffic decreases, and the value a car provides increases.

A 20 minute commute with no traffic and parking right in front because everyone else took the bus/train? Sign me up.

It is not all wasted. Walk/bike environment would have been better, but EVs solve another problem, they add energy storage to the grid. Norway has excess production from wind, they can store it and sell it to rest of Europe at higher prices. Also, creating demand is important for scale, Norways EV demand played a (somewhat) crucial role in building up battery factories when it was still a nascent industry, help economies of scale.

It may or may not have helped Norway directly, but out of all the Western economies, Norway performed the sacred function of the rich: support the growth of new technologies that will eventually help everyone.

I really don’t think the impact on car culture is that big. There are a LOT of other reasons not to drive a car in the cities. Our company just built a new office building. No additional parking was built (we are renting some spaces in an existing garage nearby but it’s a bit of a walk to the office). I don’t think it’s easy to get new parking built in Oslo. What we did get was a huge bike garage with bike showers. Even though I have an EV and access to parking, I bike to work in summer. Some of my colleagues also bike in winter.

Yeah the subsidies are high, but so are the implicit subsidies for ICE cars. There was a new tunnel construction in Norway where they found they could save millions on reduced ventilation since the impact from EVs had already reduced pollution that much.

I totally think we should reduce reliance on cars more. But Norway is already doing a LOT in that department. The public transportation of Oslo is already ridiculously good for a city that size. (How many US cities of that size has a metro?) We should consider the switch to EVs as a hard requirement to get rid of pollution and increase the energy efficient and long term costs with operating cars in the country. Now that the switch is complete (for new vehicles) we can shift the focus to making biking and public transportation even better. But we will always need cars. An electrician can’t take the bus to get to a job, and most pure office workers I know in the Oslo city do not drive to work already.

People buy new cars (~10m/year in US) and when they are at that decision point, follow this algorithm.

1) Is there any way you can walk instead?

2) Can you bike?

3) Can you use an e-bike?

4) Can you use public transportation?

5) Can you move to a place where 1-4 are doable?

6) If none of the 4 above work, are you a 2 car family (most are), then one of the cars can be EV. While you have a gas car for longer trips, most likely a minivan.

7) Can you buy a used EV? (which is already manufactured!)

8) Can you buy a used plug-in hybrid? A plug-in hybrid can be 99% electric miles, most trips are short.

9) Can you buy a new EV?

10) Can you buy a new plug-in hybrid?

11) Can you buy a used gas car? A 2023 manufactured used gas car is identical to 2024, the delta of new features is negligible (maybe new colors?).

It's not USA. "Car culture" is far less of a problem pretty much everywhere else

The incentives were obviously temporary and are already in the phase out stage with some starting being phased out since 2017.

I'd argue rather than go too far, now-ish is the right time to start addressing the issues you raise around reducing car culture.

There's a separation between how many cars we should have and what kind of cars those should be.

>noisy

Uhhh..

Yeah, the problem isn't panels, but installing them indeed.

Costs for installation and certification in Italy is around 8 times the cost of the panels.

Panels costs are irrelevant nowadays.

The best scenario would be to focus on technology that makes it trivial to connect to your home grid so people would be able to do it on their own safely.

Norway has abundant hydropower. But like you've mentioned, this transition will happen in Australia and US, it might just take longer due to incentives.

Particularly for the Southern US, I feel that the costs will continue to drop until the transition will be very sudden, and there will be a rude awakening of sorts.

US people pay about 2-3x more for just the red tap than Australians pay for the total price of getting solar installed. Including all the hardware, labor, and red tape. In the EU it's slightly better than in the US but not a lot. Also a lot of red tape, permitting and other friction.

> Australians are able to buy solar panels […] but the cost equation is shifting very quickly.

As of now, Australia has some of the lowest costs of solar panel installation in the world – the federal and state/territory governments have been providing subsidies to households to increase solar energy uptake across the nation, and, as a result, the popularity of solar panels has exploded, driving the costs down.

> If anything I'm surprised that this is happening in an area that hasn't benefited as much from dramatic reductions in electricity costs (places with Wind + Solar without large tariff regimes) rather than Australia […]

Energy costs from a conventional grid have actually more than doubled across Australia (in comparison to 2008). With solar, there was a perverse situation in Australia for a while when households connected to the grid could export the solar-generated electricity and get paid for it, but that did not lower consumer electricity prices, which kept on climbing instead.

More recently, though, paying to export – a limited feature that applies only under certain network tariffs and/or certain retail plans (especially wholesale pass-through plans during negative price periods) – has been introduced, but the battery technology has also caught up.

So with the advent of new battery technology, households have now become awash with an abundance of electricity that they can now use to, e.g., run air-conditioning if not 24x7 then very close to it, which has been a great boon for the last couple of summers when Australia has gone through bursts of severe hotwaves across the country (temperatures varied between mid-40's and as high as +50 degrees Celsius last week in some parts of Adelaide, South Australia).

> If anything I'm surprised that this is happening in an area that hasn't benefited as much from dramatic reductions in electricity costs

Electricity has been comparatively cheap (to DK at least) for a long time due to all the hydro.

I remember as a kid when visiting family in Norway, we were surprised that there were no rules on turning off the lights when closing the door to an empty room :)

Norway already had cheap, clean electricity thanks to hydro, so it makes sense they would lead on EVs and heat pumps.

Norway has lots of hydro, it’s in their best interest to use as much electricity as possible since it’s very cheap to produce.

Real talk: For the US, one equation to make this palatable is the ability to produce its own solar panels and batteries at comparable cost.

The US fucked up, but give it time.

If you compare Norway to other countries, you should always keep in mind that Norway is just blessed with energy. They have more hydropower than they consume, so electrifying everything just makes sense, even if you ignore consequences for climate and environment. They also have their own oil, and electrification will also allow them to sell more of it abroad or keep in the ground for future generations.

However, it also helps that they are good at long term planning.

Norway just keeps winning when it comes to energy. I suppose it's a good thing because it is cold up there.

How much of their imported goods are produced in countries with dirty energy?

People make all sorts of assumptions about increased grid pressure that come with electrifying the economy. It's true that we'll consume more energy overall but not that we'll have to get all of that with new generation.

A few broken assumptions here that are common:

- The existing system is 100% efficient. It's not. We have a lot of non utilized generation that is effectively discarded. Windmills that are not milling aren't generally broken but turned off because there is over production. In the same way, a lot of solar energy is not consumed and lost. We have electricity cables that are not running at full capacity. And so on.

- Existing fossil energy needs to be replaced with the same amount of electrical energy. Michael Liebreich refers to this as the primary energy fallacy (as opposed to final energy). The mistake here is that a lot of fossil fuel energy is effectively used to heat the universe rather than do anything useful. About a third or less is useful (final energy). The two thirds that are lost don't need replacing. An EV is much more efficient with its energy than an ICE car. That's why you can get the same mileage with only about 2-3 gallons of petrol worth of battery capacity. Reason: petrol engines produce mostly heat and a little bit of movement. So, the 20 gallons that go in a car mostly don't move the car. In the same way, a heat pump is way more efficient than burning gas is.

- The added load is constant and people have no control over when to consume energy. This too is nonsense. We are conditioned to think like that. But we have batteries and a lot of other technology now that can be charged when energy is cheap and discharged when it is not. Also, we can use pricing to stimulate people to optimize when they buy power and charge their batteries. A lot of new energy load is flexible. Cars can charge at night or during the middle of the day. Data centers can play with pricing to stimulate people to shift loads when energy gets more expensive. We're producing batteries by the multiple twh per year. There will be tens / hundreds of twh available to charge/discharge at moments of our choosing. That's why gas plants are being marginalized by grid batteries.

For EVs it's actually very simple. They need energy. The total amount of energy needed is a function of the amount of distance driven. About 3-4 miles per kwh is common. For Norway, trucks and cars drive a combined ~30 billion miles per year. So, if all that becomes electric and you assume a conservative 2 miles per kwh, it needs about 15 billion kwh or 15twh per year. Maybe a bit more. Let's call it 20twh. Norway's grid generates 157 twh/year. So, we're talking about ~10-15% of total energy generation. With pricing, batteries, etc. they can probably nudge that around peak energy demand in e.g. evenings and mornings to make the existing system more efficient. Also, this does not happen overnight. New cars are electric. But they still have a lot of older vehicles. It will be quite a few years before all traffic is electric. So, this isn't a shock to the system but more of a very gradual, predictable shift with a lot of potential for efficiency improvements along the way.

It's the same everywhere else. This is what a great investment opportunity looks like. Norway got clued in earlier than most countries; indeed helped by the massive amounts of clean energy they have.

Others should be able to benefit as well. IMHO, the economics are clear enough at this point that oil companies should start calculating their year on year demand declines for petrol/diesel. It's no longer a growth business. China did in fact import about 10% less diesel year on year last year. Like the shift to EVs this is a gradual decline. Not a system crash. Not yet. I do expect this to accelerate massively as the economics improve.

Eastern Europe is ready :) . Most of the small to medium crashes are solved in some way. I was baffled when 5 years ago I was repainting a wing on my ICE car and guys showed me how they are reconstructing aluminum Tesla wings (supposedly those are unrecoverable in the west).

> and uh... Tesla I suppose

Are Teslas popular in Norway?

Every new technology starts with adoption by the most affluent: cars, telephones, TVs, computers, internet, etc.

With those being able to afford when economies of scale didn't kick into very high gear yet enables products to grow into those scales, and less affluent consumers to afford them.

So yes, it's an outlier, it's also a sign of a new technology taking hold.

There are other affluent countries that doesn't do nearly as well, so there's more to it than that.

> Qatar’s EV Market reported an impressive surge, with YTD sales up to September up by 119.6%. However, it remains under 2% of total light vehicle sales, with demand still lagging behind. The government has reaffirmed its commitment to scale up EV adoption in the future, establishing the goal to reach an EV share of 10 percent of domestic sales by 2030

https://www.focus2move.com/qatari-new-vehicles/

> In 2024, electric or plug-in hybrid cars made up 28% of new registrations in Switzerland (compared with 30% in 2023). This was the first setback for such vehicles after steady growth since 2015.

https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/climate-solutions/electric-car-...

Society generally moves towards affluence, so it's an interesting bellweather.

Also, many tunnels. Less fumes makes a difference.

Electric air transport is unlikely to happen for commercial transport.

If you replaced 5500 kilograms of fuel with 5500 kilograms of modern batteries, you would need an improvement in battery efficiency of around 20 times. Batteries increase in small % over decades, not by magnitudes.

Essentially, you would need batteries that store 20 times as much energy as the best technology does now at the same weight and density.

And there's another catch: airplanes burn less fuel as they travel, because burning tons of fuel make them lighter. So it's not really a 1:1 comparison and you likely need more than 20 times to compensate.

There's other catches: cooling such batteries would be an engineering nightmare, but safety would be another concern.

What about ferries?

As opposed to the Netherlands, Norway has an abundance of hydro electric power to fuel the cars and significant oil and gas income that can easily finance these policies.

Unfortunately we're here selling ourselves too cheap. Municipalities gets blinded by big tech asking for cheap electricity and land and give them all they want, thinking it will lead to massive activity, affluent jobs etc. But after everything is built, there's a few janitors left and it's all controlled from abroad. But now the citizens pay more for their electricity, and have to build new water facilities to deal with the water usage from the centers.

Except it is remote and flat land is scarce and very expensive.

Our economy is modern in that it has been reorganized to divert tax revenue to unemployed migrants who then use that to buy up property and other goods and services, thus driving up the living cost for taxpayers.

There have also been various other initiatives that have significantly driven up the electricity cost and made industry almost entirely non-viable.

10/10 Labour government. Top A #1 top economy. Amazing Inflation creation capabilities and expertise. Everything is better except for the things which are worse which is everything.

With V2G a large EV fleet would actually stabilize the grid.

Hydro can help a lot with that. Grid stability is a big issue with non-synchronous power sources (SNSP).

What would you like Norway to do? It's been more successful than other countries (generally speaking) insulating its economy from Oil. Would it be better to _not_ also try to drive adoption of clean energy?

Well, the easy path would have been to keep burning fossil fuels because they have plenty.

Just like the fact I can't stop my neighbours from littering but I can certainly control my own behaviour.

Subsidies where needed 10 years ago, today the US and EU have to put massive tariffs on mass produced, cheap, superior EVs to keep their own ICE auto industry alive.