For the first time in Norwegian automotive history, the country’s vehicle fleet now has more fully electric cars than cars with just a petrol engine. This was announced by the Norwegian equivalent of the RWD, the Road Traffic Information Council (OFV). Let’s dive into the figures. There are a total of 2,872,652 passenger cars on the road in Norway. Of these, 754,303 have a fully electric drivetrain. This means that more than a quarter (26.26 percent) of all cars in Norway are EVs. If we look at cars with just a petrol engine and therefore without hybrid technology, we see that there are 753,905 traditional petrol cars on the road in Norway. That is indeed slightly less. However, the Norwegian vehicle fleet still has more cars with a petrol engine on board than fully electric cars. According to the figures from OFV, there are 197,707 plug-in hybrids with a petrol engine and 155,307 cars with a regular hybrid drivetrain on the road. If we add these, it turns out that there are more than 1.1 million cars with a petrol engine on the road in Norway. 38.5 percent of the fleet therefore has a petrol engine on board. The Norwegian fleet also has a relatively large number of cars with a diesel engine: 999,715 units. Almost a million units, which means that diesel cars account for 34.8 percent of the fleet. Furthermore, there are 9,478 cars with a plug-in hybrid drivetrain with a diesel engine and 896 cars with a plug-free hybrid drivetrain with a diesel engine. In addition, the Norwegian fleet has 173 cars with an LPG or CNG installation and 167 cars that consume hydrogen. If we add up all cars with a combustion engine – including hybrid cars with a petrol and diesel engine and cars that use gas – we arrive at 2,117,579 cars. Almost 74 percent of the total vehicle fleet. Norwegian decline In 2004 – twenty years ago – the Norwegian vehicle fleet still consisted of 1.6 million regular petrol cars and 230,000 diesel cars. Moreover, there were only around 1,000 electric cars driving around in the country at that time. The significant increase in the number of diesel cars in Norway was related to changes in tax rules in 2007, which made diesel cars more attractive. In 2017, there were 1.2 million diesel cars in Norway. There would never be so many again. According to OFV, around one million petrol cars have disappeared from Norway in the past twenty years. Some of them have been replaced by electric cars and diesels. However, it does not seem to be long before there are more electric cars than cars with a diesel engine in Norway. We do not have particularly up-to-date figures on the Dutch vehicle fleet. We do know that of the 9,233,107 passenger cars that the Dutch vehicle fleet counted at the beginning of 2023, 340,583 were fully electric. 3.7 percent of the total vehicle fleet. The number of cars with a non-hybrid petrol engine was then 7,244,730 units.
Source: www.autoweek.nl
