How do we make the move to electric cars happen? Ask Norway

theguardian.com:

I’ve just been standing for 10 minutes at a moderately quiet junction near where I work in Cambridge. During that time I’ve seen six electric vehicles (EVs) – three VW ID.3s, a Nissan Leaf, a Nissan white van and a Renault Zoe. Three years ago, if I’d been standing at the same spot, I’d have seen precisely zero such vehicles. And what that brought to mind was Ernest Hemingway’s celebrated reply to the question: how does one go bankrupt? “Two ways,” he said. “Gradually, then suddenly.”

Something similar is going on in relation to adoption of EVs in Britain. The hockey-stick graph is common in consumer technologies. We saw it in the early years of mobile phones, when text messaging was ignored by adults as an inferior form of email. But when pay-as-you-go tariffs arrived and teenagers could have phones, SMS use suddenly shot skywards. The arrival of kids represented a tipping point – a point in time when a group rapidly changes its behaviour by widely adopting a previously rare practice.

Britain hasn’t reached a tipping point with EVs yet, and so the first question is: when is it likely to occur? It needs to be earlier than most people think, because the government has decreed that sales of new petrol and diesel cars must cease by 2030. The second question, then, is: what will persuade – or force – people to change their cars?

The best place to look for answers is Norway, the one country that has been through the tipping point. Ten years ago, diesel cars accounted for 75% of new sales there. Today they make up just 2.3%. Two-thirds of all new cars sold there in 2021 were EVs and the predictions are that proportion will reach 80% this year. Ye olde internal combustion engine seems destined for extinction in that particular