"exporting your own oil and gas to be able to have a 'clean' (and up to recently heavily subsidized) transportation network is in a way just a gigantic bookkeeping trick"

How so?

If every oil exporter used some of their oil revenue to switch to EVs, that would, all things equal, hasten the transition to EVs. The U.S. is not doing that.

Top market? I'm pretty sure that's China.

Speaking of bookkeeping tricks: Kneecapping renewable energy (wind), cancelling the EV future in the US, and then starting a war in the strait of hormuz will someday be acknowledged as the finest moment of the oil industry, maximizing profit in the face of all reason.

Sure, but there is also China where over half of new vehicle sales are EVs. Denmark is at 70%, Sweden, Iceland, Finland and the Netherlands are all above 50%, a bunch of other countries in the EU are at one third EVs. In India, 5% of sales are EVs but that is double of the year before and all the big car manufacturers in India are now offering EVs. Even Australia is at 14% after stalling on EVs for years. So change is unfolding quite quickly compared to previous years. https://www.visualcapitalist.com/ev-share-new-car-sales-by-c...

They seem to be solving the “Resource Curse” quite well.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse

No, it is a real invewtment in the right direction. The oil states in the middle east could have made such investments, too. Lots of EV powered by solar panels paid for with oil dollar. But they did not (in a significant way).

I mean - how are you defining most?

Most countries are quite poor and/or have small populations and aren't buying many vehicles period.

About ~45% of countries have smaller populations than Norway, and Norway is in the top ~25% of countries by size of the auto market...

Most countries are not the China and India, yet they make up almost 45% of the global population.

The US and China make up about 45% of the auto market...

There's a lot of European, Asian, and Latin American countries that have more in common with Norway than they do with the US or China or India.

There is still one country that uses leaded gasoline for personal cars.

For automobiles, the future comes very slowly.

> It is the top EV market.

per-capita or by total volume? i ask because a sibling or child comment says that the number of cars sold in norway is pretty small (in part because the population is small). a quick google says 180k cars sold in norway in 2025 (we can round up to 100% EV) and 34M sold in China. It also says China has 50% EV sales. So by total volume Norway isn't close to the top.

At least it doesn’t smell ICE fumes downtown. That’s neat.

>But that future will not arrive everywhere at the same point in time and Norway is very far ahead of the rest of the world due to a fairly unique set of circumstances: exporting your own oil and gas to be able to have a 'clean' (and up to recently heavily subsidized) transportation network is in a way just a gigantic bookkeeping trick.

Not really. Even in a hypothetical future where all road vehicles are electric, we'll still need fossil fuels for a while. For one thing, it's probably going to be a while before airplanes can go electric. And production of plastics will probably need petroleum for a long time.

Most of the profits come from rich countries. And even then especially the more expensive cars.

(Personally I am fine driving a 10 year old shit box because for me it is just a means of going from A to B and rather spend my money on other things)

What's silly is that the reality you describe is a choice that's been made, not something fundamental to EVs. Cars like the Nissan Leaf and the Chevy Bolt are supremely inexpensive. China's BYD cars are extremely cheap for what they are.

American/European car makers realized there is a large class of people who are wealthy and will buy a high end EV for status reasons, and started chasing that market instead.

Yeah, visiting my ex-Gf family in Norway, I realized how much richer Norwegians are that it's not even funny. It's not really a market representative of the average buyer. Same how neither Switzerland, Luxembourg or Monaco are.

I am living in a working class neighborhood of apartment buildings in West-central Europe with average to below average earners, and there's zero EVs parked here on the streets, basically 90% of people have old diesel cars. Only when you go towards the suburbs with rich(inherited wealth) people living in single family homes you see everyone has an EV.

The distinction is quite clear, do you live in a house or have your own parking space and possibility to install your own charger? Then EV 100% no brainer. Otherwise people stick to ICE.

> the car is cheaper than the same class ICE,

To give you some perspective, the most popular EV in China costs $6000 (Wuling Mini). New. The second most popular costs $10000 (Geely Xingyuan). I tried both, and they are far less crappy than they have the right to be. They are cheap cars for sure, but they're perfectly adequate for regular use.

And Geely Xingyuan has a 40kWh battery in the basic configuration! This is utterly ridiculous for a car that is _that_ cheap.

So China basically murdered the global ICE market. It's gone. There's no going back. Once China figures out the logistics and sales, ICE vehicles will be dead in all of the less affluent countries. Especially because EVs combine almost too perfectly with solar generation.

In NZ cheapest EV right now (I think it is clearance) is 15.8K USD.

US car culture has been dead for a long time, at least internationally. People like big American cars made in 50s - 70s for their looks, but since then all I can think of are oversized pickups, Nascar and Tesla which is getting eaten alive by Chinese competitors.

What fun about an ICE vehicle. Loud, slow acceleration, pollution, poisoned garages, transmissions, maintenance, gas is 10x as expensive vs charging at home. It’s shit. My EV smokes Porsches when I need to overtake them.

The only thing gas does better is higher range and quicker fill ups.

Norway has roughly the population of the average US state. So I guess no-one really lives in the USA.

There must be more to it than this, or we'd have fantastic EV uptake here in New Zealand (we don't - EVs currently only have a 6% market share).

> massive hydro energy resources

That is irrelevant unless Norway has unused capacity.

If a country adds electric cars using more electric power, then what really matters is how that extra power is generated.

It gets weird in Europe because adding extra load in Norway could easily mean that Poland does more generation using coal.

I'm in New Zealand where the government owned generators are preventing solar installations. One example was via an unobvious regulation that the installation had to handle massively overengineered earthquake rules. Meanwhile we use coal or imported gas when the isn't enough rain for our hydro. And we waste about 10% of our total capacity exporting (via one aluminium plant).

> hydro energy resources

What is a hydro energy resource, a river? Don't lots of countries have rivers?

(If we're talking about hydroelectric power plants they've chosen to build, that's not exactly a resource -- and other countries could choose to build those too, right?)

Solar and wind is cheap too, no need to attack the Middle East.

More importantly it's one of the richest countries in the world, and has high taxes but big tax breaks for EVs.

And massive oil resources. As a result of this, one of the wealthiest sovereign wealth funds on the planet, which they manage well and for the good of the country.

Their hydro energy company is an aluminum company company, they have so much slack power they export it refining bauxite.

It is worth repeating solar panels covering an area about the size of NH generate enough power to supply all current entire US energy needs.

And lots of bad conscious from all the oil.

As others have said most of that was probably not pollution related to being an ICE vehicle, but if even part of it was the environmental performance of ICEs is magnitudes better over the last 25 years when it comes to unburned hydrocarbons and particulates, which WOULD reduce visible pollution way more than modest EV adoption. CO2 reduction? not so much with bigger vehicles offsetting gains here...

> The back half of winter was characterized by blackened, salt-saturated puddles and banks. I wonder if the prevalence of EVs has made things less dirty in the winter.

The dominant cause of that is probably brake and tire particulate matter, not car exhaust. And EVs make tire pollution go up (because they're heavier) and brake pollution... I'm not sure if the weight effect there is counteracted by the decreased amount of friction brake use (as opposed to resistance braking).

isn't that at least partially caused by the rubber tire particles?

California has 1.6 charge stalls per gas nozzle. Does that count?

I places like Japan (small, population dense, with small cars) you can use a 120V outlet to charge an EV. Most places have 240V household outlets, and can charge at least twice as fast.

So, if you have a garage with electricity, infrastructure isn’t really an issue. Sooner or later it will be common to mandate a charger per residential parking spot. The chargers themselves are $200. The main costs are permitting and retrofitting, but that matters a lot less for new development.

If one circuit per parking spot seems like a lot of infrastructure, consider the fact that most apartments have at least a half dozen circuits already.

Yup, everyone else should be taking notes.

So EVs that reduce both are a double win!

EU is introducing regulations for this kind of emissions which will likely create a market for a few new techs that reduce it (reformulated tyres, modern drum brakes that capture dust, etc)

> Long time before our electrical systems to be able to compensate for that kind of whole sale change. Will be at least 20 years if it ever happens.

I don't know about the whole national electric grid, but at my house, I didn't really have to upgrade anything and didn't even notice an increase in electric bill when I started plugging in my EV. I don't think my car is even 20% of my household electricity usage. I'd hope we can increase our national grid's capability by at least 20% in the next 20 years. (Also, aren't datacenters causing that massive demand right now, whether or not the upgrades are even there yet? As I understand this is causing massive price increases?)

> I would also say that any ICE vehicle that has 0 subscription models, upgradable firmware, tracking software will probably have a value premium to it in the not distant future.

As you kind of hint at, whether or not the vehicle is EV or ICE has nothing to do with whether it has subscription models, tracking, etc. and car manufacturers are racing towards both of those things in a way that makes the drivetrain irrelevant.

> Will be at least 20 years if it ever happens.

And if 100% of EV's sold this year were electric, it would take ~24 years for basically all of the vehicles on the road were electric. (The average age of registered cars in the US is 12 years old).

Estimates are that a 100% EV fleet would increase electricity demand by 20%. So that's < 1 % a year.

Approximately how much demand increases due to increasing A/C usage in the US.

And a lot less than AI/crypto is increasing demand.

And that's not to mention that EV charging is a relatively easy demand to meet -- most EV owners charge when it's cheapest, so you can shape demand via price signals.

>Long time before our electrical systems to be able to compensate for that kind of whole sale change. Will be at least 20 years if it ever happens.

There's little to no reason that the electrical grid itself needs to change for the sake of EV's.

The biggest problem is that while slow charging (L2) in your own garage would be perfect for 99%+ of people in the US, and isn't even very expensive, that's a barrier to entry most people do not want to screw with. So, everyone wants DC fast that mimics a gas station experience, even if it's completely unnecessary for almost everyone's use cases.

Land is limited, new builds like that are expensive, slower to earn returns, and make little sense with so few EVs in the US - which leads to a viscous cycle. It's a bit of TotC.

>I would also say that any ICE vehicle that has 0 subscription models, upgradable firmware, tracking software will probably have a value premium to it in the not distant future.

Consumers do not care about this. If they did, such cars would not sell. No one is going to pay extra for fewer features.

His first sentence is literally disclaiming that he is in an outlier market.