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IN JULY, 97.6% of every new car sold in Norway was fully electric. Not “mostly electric with some hybrids thrown in” but fully electric.

Petrol and diesel cars are now so marginal in Norway’s new car market that when 12 petrol cars were sold there in a single month earlier this year, it made international news.

Electric cars have already overtaken diesel on Norway’s roads, and close to a third of the country’s entire vehicle fleet—not just new sales, the whole fleet—is now battery electric.

Most of the main manufacturers don’t even bother importing petrol or diesel cars to the country anymore.

I’ve spent a lot of this year writing about Ireland’s own EV numbers. We just hit a genuine milestone ourselves: electric cars overtook hybrids in July to become Ireland’s single most popular new car choice, on 26% of year-to-date registrations.

It’s real progress, and it puts us ahead of markets like Italy, Spain, and the UK. But set next to Norway, that 26% looks small in comparison. And it’s worth asking why.

The answer isn’t really about electric cars at all, but it’s about what happens when a government picks a policy and then, almost uniquely among governments anywhere, sticks with it for three decades without flinching.

It started with a pop star and a stolen Fiat

The most unlikely detail in the whole story is where it actually began: not in a government department, but with a converted Fiat Panda and one of the biggest pop bands on the planet.

In 1989, Norwegian environmental campaigners Harald N. Røstvik and Frederic Hauge were struggling to get anyone to take electric cars seriously, so they recruited A-ha—fresh off Take On Me and the Bond theme The Living Daylights—to help.

They imported a Fiat Panda that had been converted from petrol to electric (28-mile range, 48-hour recharge time, back seats ripped out to fit the batteries) and used it to stage seven years of deliberate civil disobedience: driving through toll booths without paying, parking illegally, refusing vehicle taxes, and getting the car impounded and bought back more than a dozen times.

The point they were making was simple: if you want people to switch to something cleaner, waiving the tolls and taxes on it has to be part of the deal.

As A-ha’s Morten Harket put it decades later, “it was what we needed to do… it just made every sense.”

By the mid-1990s, the campaign had shamed the government into adopting most of the incentives the campaigners had been demanding all along: bus lane access, free parking, free ferry travel, and zero tax.

An unlikely paymaster

There’s a second irony sitting underneath the first: the country that became the world’s electric car capital got rich from oil.

North Sea reserves discovered in the 1960s turned Norway into one of the wealthiest nations on earth per capita, and funnelled that wealth into a sovereign wealth fund now worth well over a trillion euro.

That fund gave Norway something almost no other government has when it comes to green policy: the fiscal headroom to make good on those 1990s promises and be extraordinarily generous with incentives for decades, without needing them to pay for themselves.

As A-ha’s Magne Furuholmen said of the band’s own role in it: “our hands are black from the oil that we got rich off… I think we carry a certain responsibility of being in front, leading the way, for that reason.”

By 2001 the government had made the single move that mattered most: EVs were exempted entirely from Norway’s 25% VAT.

Combine that with no purchase tax, and an electric car in Norway could suddenly cost meaningfully less than the petrol or diesel equivalent — not “greener but pricier,” just plain cheaper. That’s a completely different sales pitch to the one most other countries have offered.

Carrot, stick, and repeat for 30 years

What’s easy to miss, if you only look at the perks the A-ha campaign won, is that Norway didn’t just make EVs cheap and convenient, but rather it made combustion cars expensive and inconvenient at the same time through steep registration taxes tied to weight and emissions.

On top of that, the state built out one of the densest public charging networks anywhere, with more than 25,000 points blanketing a country that isn’t exactly short of empty roads between towns. It was never one clever scheme. It was a dozen smaller ones, pulling in the same direction, for a very long time.

That last part, the very long time, is probably the single biggest lesson in the whole Norwegian story, and the one that’s hardest for other countries to copy. Plenty of governments have announced EV grants.

Far fewer have kept the same basic policy direction stable for 25 years running, through changes of government and swings in oil prices, without watering it down, reversing it, or letting it lapse in a budget squeeze.

Norwegian buyers didn’t need to gamble on whether an incentive would still exist by the time their next car was due. They could plan around it. So could dealers, and so could the charging network operators who had to justify the capital spend.

The bill comes due

Norway’s own numbers now tell an interesting second chapter. Having effectively completed the transition, the country hit its own 2025 target of “all new cars zero-emission” essentially on schedule; the government has started dismantling the very incentives that got it there.

The VAT exemption is being phased out on a sliding scale: from January 2026, it only applies in full below a lower price threshold, dropping further in 2027, and disappearing entirely by 2028.

Toll exemptions have already been trimmed back to a discount rather than a free pass.

The reasoning, more or less stated outright by Norway’s finance ministry, is that when 95%+ of buyers are already choosing electric anyway, there’s no longer much point spending an estimated 17.5 billion kroner (€1.59 billion) a year subsidising a choice people are making regardless.

Particularly when EV buyers have, on average, been wealthier than the buyers of the second-hand petrol cars they left behind.

Norway’s own EV lobby group has called the pace of withdrawal too abrupt, which is its own small irony: an EV industry now pushing back against the removal of supports it spent decades demanding.

What it means for Ireland

It’s tempting to read all this and conclude Ireland simply needs Norway-style incentives. We don’t have a trillion-euro sovereign wealth fund to lean on, but we do have some of the same ingredients in smaller doses—VRT relief, SEAI grants, and motor tax bands that favour EVs.

What we haven’t had, and what the Norwegian experience suggests actually matters more than the size of any single grant, is three uninterrupted decades of a government not changing its mind.

The scale of the gap is worth being honest about. Ireland’s new EV registrations would need to roughly triple just to match Denmark, currently at 80%, and would need to nearly quadruple to get anywhere near Norway.

And new car sales are the easy part of this story. Ireland’s total vehicle fleet—every car already on the road, not just this year’s new arrivals—is still only around 4% electric, a figure that took 16 years to reach since our first EV registration back in 2010. Norway’s equivalent fleet figure is already 32.4%; Denmark’s is 21%. Turning over an entire national fleet takes far longer than winning a single year’s new car market, and it’s the metric that will really tell us how this transition is going a decade from now.

None of that is a reason for gloom about Ireland’s own progress. 26% is a real number, and the direction of travel is unmistakably the right one. In July 2026 there were 68% more searches for EVs on DoneDeal Cars than in July 2025. At the time of the fuel protests and when the recent scrappage scheme was announced, this figure was over 100% more than the months the previous year. There is certainly intent at least.

But Norway’s story is a useful corrective to any temptation to declare victory too early. It didn’t get to 98% through one good budget measure. It got there through three decades of not blinking. That’s the hard part to replicate.

Paddy Comyn is the head of automotive content and communications with DoneDeal Cars. He has been involved in the Irish motor industry for more than 25 years. 

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