Norway is the market where electric cars stopped being a minority. In 2025 they took 95.9% of new passenger car registrations, and the remaining share of petrol and diesel is now small enough that a change of a few hundred cars moves it.
That happened through taxation. A new petrol or diesel car pays a registration tax calculated from its weight and its CO2 emissions, and 25% VAT on top; electric cars were exempt from both for most of the last two decades. Norway never banned anything and never paid a purchase subsidy. It made the petrol version of a car the more expensive one to buy, and let people choose accordingly. The full sequence of measures, and the schedule now dismantling them, is in how Norway made almost every new car electric.
No cars are built here in volume. What Norway offers a carmaker is a market where an electric model competes against other electric models rather than against a cheaper petrol one, which is why it has repeatedly been used as a launch country: BYD brought the Tang here in 2020, Xpeng delivered its first export cars here in December 2020, and Nio opened its first market outside China here in 2021.
