A quarter of all car sales in the U.K. are EVs, and thanks to Donald’s war on affordable fuel the figure is increasing.

@TheDeathOCuHullainn I am currently leasing a tesla to be as kind of a test.
The one thing I really like is not having to go to the gas station and dealing with the pumps that don't always work.
If you can charge at home at the lesser rate times, its really worth it.

@Adrift The Model Y is still the best selling car in Norway by a wide margin. Even though sales of the Model Y have declined by nearly 20% in the last year .

Here is the top 20 (most sold at the top). The numbers are the change in the number of vehicles sold of that model compared to the previous year:

@ninalanyon It seems like there are more of them that are becoming more affordable.

@Adrift Yes but they have some way to go before they can compete with the really cheap cars that sell well in other countries such as the Dacias. I think the corresponding list would be quite different in other countries. That list doesn't tell the whole story; I think there are more than twenty other EV models before you get to the first ICE car.

@Gingerbreadspice If your use case makes EV's viable that's great. Where do you charge? Off street on your own property? Or on-street via a public app-based charging setup either on the street or a dedicated EV charging station? Are you comfortable charging in an enclosed space like an underground carpark?

@zonavar68 I charge it at my house. Car charger fixed to wall on house. Not everyone has this but it’s getting more common. There are EV charging stations everywhere, even in big supermarkets. Never charged it in an underground car park.

@zonavar68 We have a charger on the drive. Then there are charging points st every petrol station. And some places of work.

@AdmiralPrune Norway's entire economy only works because of the country's oil exports. Take that away, and Norway reverts to being the equivalent of a third-world country or at least dropping to being just like one of the former USSR european/baltic countries where poverty is rife.

@zonavar68 I don’t have a problem with oil. The whole point is it’s expensive because of Trumps Iran clusterfuck.

@zonavar68 Norway is actively planning for and investing in a post-fossil fuel future. Most of the Gulf states are too. It has established the most valuable sovereign wealth fund in the world. It is highly unlikely that it will become a "third world country" when the oil runs dry.

@zonavar68 Yes it is. I’ve got a petrol car, my wife has an EV, we compared who spent what getting to Harrogate when helping a friend move hotter in September. She won 💰

@AdmiralPrune The EV pro use case is very restricted, hence why retail sales and therefore registrations are very restricted. Here in Australia with 1/10th the population of the USA in the same land area and most of it concentrated on the east and south east in a band 100 km from the coast means the practicality of EV's is seriously limited.

I'm a freight train driver for work and we used to have electric locos operating in the 1500 V DC electrified network here in NSW until about 2000, then the state government of the day made it uneconomical to use them by altering the legislative framework in which the state's railways operated due to lobbying pressure from the road transport industry primarily.

The only electric freight haulage in Australia is 25 KV AC and exists in QLD and it's all only because of coal export revenue and taxes that it stays viable.

Shifting to a distributed energy transformation model to feed the grid also renders large scale electrification of railways (outside of city suburban/commuter passenger rail systems) mostly impractical here as transport is a high consumer of energy. We are close to losing a lot of large manufacturing industries because the energy system changes are making them impossible to sustain - steelmaking, aluminium production, etc. which require massive amounts of energy through both gas and electricity.

@zonavar68 @AdmiralPrune I think your exchange shows mere comparisons by numbers, prices or similar between countries are not really very useful, and it is necessary to consider backgrounds such as the vast distances across Australia contrasted with those between major towns in Britain, different Government policies, relevant costs-of-living, different customer preferences, etc.

Most of the cities in England are no more than about 100 miles or so from the next, for example.

Where such conversations do count is in exchanging and considering the differences and reasons as well as their results.


If the sales of electric vehicles are relatively so different between the UK and Australia, there are no single, simple reasons for it.

There are still many routes on Britain's railways that have not been electrified as British Railways started in the late-1950s, and those that are have inherited two totally different systems (with one of the nation's main container-ship harbours on the "wrong" side of the break, too); but this stasis is not for the same reasons as in Australia.

@TheOneyouwerewarnedabout

@TheOneyouwerewarnedabout At least the emissions aren't then belched into the atmosphere, like they would be if you fueled a diesel car from a diesel generator.