Volkswagen E-Golf Crushing Competition In Norway

Aug Norway EV SalesI’ve finally got what seems to be official and complete data on electric car registrations in Norway. Woohoo! (In case you haven’t been following along for years, public data on electric car sales/registrations are not available for all models in practically every large country in the world.) However, last month, a reader tipped me off to an obscure (and time-consuming) way for obtaining Norway electric car sales by model.

The data I’ve collected comes from doing simple calculations based on data presented on Grønn Bil, which I think originally comes from Ofvas (but is not presented on its website). It seems to include “personal” as well as “commercial” registrations.

The main story in Norway is that the Volkswagen e-Golf is absolutely crushing the competition. For the year to date, it has more than twice the registrations of the #2 Nissan LEAF.

The Tesla Model S is right behind the Nissan LEAF at #3, but it was #6 in August. #4 for the year to date is the Mitsubishi Outlander PHEV (with a solid lead ahead of the #5 Audi A3 e-tron), but it was again far below that in August, sitting at #7 (and the e-tron was even further down, at #10).

The cars that moved up a lot in August relative to earlier in the year were the Kia Soul EV (#3 in August, #7 year to date), BMW i3 (#4 in August, #8 YTD), and Volkswagen Golf GTE (#5 in August, #10 YTD).

Interesting changes. And it will be interesting to see what happens when the 2016 LEAF (with 107 miles of range) hits the market. Can it take back #1 from the VW e-Golf? Also, how will the Tesla Model X do once production gets rolling? I’ll venture to say quite well.

By the way, electric car sales seemed to account for ~26% of all new car sales in Norway in August and 25% for the year through August — but I say “seemed to” because I’m not entirely sure if the source of all new car sales is including commercial sales or not (but I think this says that the number does include commercial sales).

Here are the full charts and table:

Norway EV Sales 2014 - August 2015

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