The following incentives from the article seem key.
- No purchase taxes
- Exemption from 25% VAT on purchase
- Low annual road tax
- No charges on toll roads or ferries
- Free municipal parking
- Access to bus lanes
- 50% reduction in company car tax
- No VAT on leasing
Yet another story on how exemplary Norway is. Yet the reason Norway is able to provide these incentives is because they made a fortune selling oil. I'm conflicted on these Norway stories because while I applaud all of these efforts, the reality is that they are largely possible only because of oil money.
Not to mention, the Norwegians did a great job of investing the oil money wisely.
Most other oil -rich countries are plagued by corruption and/or short-term thinking. Norway, from day one, planned for the day when there would be no more oil money.
What makes you think that the oil has anything to do with it?
Really the connection between electric cars and oil is the long term thinking that both require, the kind of forward thinking that drove Norway to INVEST the tax income from the oil instead of SQUANDERING it as the UK did.
I lived the first 30 years of my life in the UK so I saw at first hand how it was done there and I've been in Norway now for another 30 years and this sort of thing is definitely handled better here (no it's not paradise but there seem to be fewer people trying to turn it into hell).
Americas wars have often been in places that coincidentally favour their local business monopolies. "War is a racket" by Major General Smedley Butler is a good historical primer in this.
The wars in Iraq were fairly obviously related to the oil production in this area. If done because of that, then the 3 Trillion (that's trillion, with a T) spent on these wars is a subsidy of every oil user in the US.
I doubt that this model is sustainable. In Denmark, the tax exemption on electric vehicles is now being phased out because it got too popular and the resulting decrease in tax revenue would be to heavy.
The CO2 contribution from electricity is going to get better not worse, especially in states like California. California is hell bent to get off fossil fuels.
Even in the hypothetical case of clean electricity the lifetime co2 emissions are significant of resource intensive manufacturing, as roughly half of the lifetime co2 footprint happens in manufacturing phase.
Better than gasoline powered cars, but not order of magnitude better. So we still can't have everyone driving cars in the future.
