Eighty-eight per cent of new cars sold in Norway last year were electric, compared to just 3.8 per cent in Australia, and the Nordic nation is on track to meet its goal of 100 per cent by 2025.
Cars and other private vehicles produce about 10 per cent of Australia’s carbon dioxide emissions where the nation’s sluggish EV uptake – which also trails the US (8 per cent), UK (23 per cent) and Europe (25 per cent) – is an obstacle to .
Bent-Joacim Bentzen, Norway’s transport state secretary, said that, like in Australia, there was scepticism in his country about EVs when it embarked on its transition, with particular concern about charging infrastructure in remote parts of the country.
“But as we have paved the way forward … people saw that this actually works,” he told The Age on the sidelines of the International Transport Forum’s annual summit in Leipzig, Germany.
The Albanese government released Australia’s first federal EV strategy in April, promising to introduce fuel efficiency standards, encourage manufacturers to import more EVs, but it attracted criticism for not setting a timeline to phase out petrol vehicle sales.
Norway first removed import taxes for EVs in 1990. Bentzen said the shift to EVs accelerated dramatically in 2016 when it set its target for 100 per cent of new cars, city buses and vans to be zero-emissions vehicles by 2025.
“You don’t get where you want to get without the targets. We set that goal, then the transition started,” he said.
Car manufacturers have been put on notice they will not sell any petrol cars in Norway after 2025.
“We just told them: you have the deadline, so you can be in or you can go out,” Bentzen said.
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