The crisis in the automotive industry continues in Italy and Europe. According to December results in our country, just under 1.6 million registrations will be made in the sector this year. Pure electric vehicles (BEV), representing only 65 thousand of them, correspond to 4 percent of the market, with a slight decrease compared to 2023, despite the incentives.
These are data from the Confcommercio Mobilità-Federmotorizzazione, which points to European Union policies. “As electric cars are at least 30 percent more expensive than conventional cars, the EU has left a huge competitive advantage to China in the segment of affordable endothermic cars, driving a gap between wealthy and less wealthy citizens. Sustainability cannot just be environmental,” said Simonpaolo Buongiardino, president of the organisation. “But it’s also social and economic,” he said.
Norway bucks the trend
The industry is in crisis across the continent, but when it comes to environmentally friendly cars, one country clearly stands out: Norway. It is very close to achieving its goal of eliminating fossil fuel car sales by the end of 2025, which it set in 2017.
This country, which is not a member of the European Union but is a part of the EU Single Market, started on this path long before us and managed to reach the target set by the EU for 2035 ten years early. Of course yes it is. It’s a much smaller market, with a population of under six million and wealth per capita, but we can learn important lessons from the Oslo strategy.
Incentives are central
The market change was mainly due to incentives that began as early as 1994. At the time, the Think City, a small, boxy electric vehicle unveiled at the Lillehammer Winter Olympics, was exempt from registration tax. As Bloomberg reconstructs it, as the technology emerged a decade or two later, successive governments expanded benefits for electric vehicle drivers: free parking, access to bus lanes, and exemptions from tolls, road taxes, and VAT.
Although Norway has started to reduce some benefits, for example by removing the VAT exemption for more expensive models in 2023, the key benefits remain and make electric vehicles a significant presence on Norwegian roads. As a result, repair shops are investing in training on new technologies, chains of electric refueling stations are replacing petrol pumps, and network operators are faced with increasing demand for the high-voltage connections needed for charging points.
All this has created an environment where owning an electric car is convenient and even comfortable. Electric vehicles initially became common in major cities such as Oslo and Bergen, but today they are also used in more remote areas such as the Arctic island of Svalbard and Kerkenes, a few kilometers from the Russian border.
sales boom
If in Italy we are stuck at 4 percent, in Norway in September, according to the Road Federation, at least 90 percent of new cars sold in every county are powered by batteries, in some regions this rate even reaches 98 percent. But older generation vehicles continue to ply Norwegian roads, with electric cars accounting for only a quarter of the total; This figure is expected to reach half by 2030.
Norwegian citizens also have a wide range of models to choose from: There are approximately 170 electric car models available in the country. Tesla has overtaken Toyota and Volkswagen as the best-selling brand, but Chinese manufacturers such as Xpeng, BYD and Nio are rapidly gaining ground in the market.
Source: Today IT
Roy Brown is a renowned economist and author at The Nation View. He has a deep understanding of the global economy and its intricacies. He writes about a wide range of economic topics, including monetary policy, fiscal policy, international trade, and labor markets.
