There are Teslas everywhere in this city.
Up until today I'd seen a total of about five Teslas my entire life.
And three of those five were behind glass
cases in luxury malls.
I've been in Oslo for like a couple of hours and I've seen like 50 Teslas.
There's one right there.
They're beautiful, they're sleek, they are
efficient, they're fast and they're $70,000.
Here comes another one up the road.
Oh yeah.
100% electricity, no gas, and it can go from like zero to 100 kilometers
in like five seconds. I have no idea, I'm not a car person, so I don't know if that's right.
Here in Norway in 2014, Tesla actually broke a record for number
of cars sold in a month for a single model, of any kind of car not just
electric cars. And you look around for a few minutes and you realize it's not
just Teslas. There are electric cars everywhere. Like, I see electric cars in
the United States but nothing like this. Oh, there's a Tesla, there's a Tesla.
There it goes.
Turns out that Oslo is actually the epicenter of electric cars generally.
You can tell which cars are electric by their license plate. So this "E" at the
beginning determines if it's electric. In 2016 in the United States of all the new
cars that were purchased about 1% were electric, more like 0.9%.
In Norway it was 29% and that trend is only speeding up: in January this year the share was like
37% or something of all the cars purchased being electric.
Where on earth have I ended up? I've been kind of wandering around and I feel
like I'm about to enter a secret cave. The real question is can I fly my drone
over this amazing waterfall? I've never flown a drone in Norway before so we'll see how this goes.
99% of Norway's electricity comes from hydropower which is like dams.
So you have really cheap clean energy that can be used to power these electric cars.
The real core explanation here, the reason why there are so many Teslas and so many
electric cars on the road comes down to government policy.
The government incentivizes very very strongly people to buy electric cars.
This happens in various forms: you get free parking if you drive an electric
car, you get access to the HOV Lane, which has way less traffic,
you don't have to pay registration fees, you get tax deductions on your income tax,
and perhaps the biggest incentive of all is on the business side: companies like
Tesla don't ha ve to pay sales tax for selling here in Norway and so all of
this combined makes it actually way way cheaper for someone to buy a Tesla here
in Norway than to buy one in the United States.
Well it's been fun exploring this random little area I think the big takeaway
from this whole entire journey so far is even thugz cry.
So just remember: even thugz cry.
Alright, this is perhaps my favorite sight so far.
There are 2,000 of these charging stations here in Oslo.
Excuse me can I ask you a couple, I'm so curious about - can I record it? Yeah, of course.
So it's it's all free. It's free? Yeah, it's free.
This is what you get from buying an electric car. You get free charging and
you can go in and out of Oslo without paying for the "bompenger" (toll).
All of these subsidies we're talking about that, help fund these electric cars are funded
by what's called sovereign wealth fund. It's this huge fund that Norway has it's
worth almost a trillion dollars. The government owns it it's basically their
rainy day fund and this is what they use to fund the subsidies.
The sovereign wealth fund in Norway is comprised almost entirely of oil money,
oil and gas money, fossil fuels. Norway's a huge producer of oil and gas and they sell
that to other countries and reap the benefits in terms of revenue and put
that into the sovereign wealth fund which then gets funneled into subsidies
for electric cars. So they're not burning the oil here and releasing carbon into
the atmosphere but they're sending off to go be burned somewhere else.
I asked my friend Tor what he thinks about this. Tor, what do you feel about Norway being
this green sustainable society, but really depending at the end of the day
on fossil fuels in order to make that happen?
Is that a tension within the Norwegian psyche? So I think the way we resolve it
is basically that the world needs oil. It needs, you know there's a lot of
countries are developing: China, India, that will always need energy and we
would argue that we extract it more greenly than other countries.
We're buying good conscience for sure yeah but like it's better than
doing anything. We're fully aware that there's like green shift we're talking
about is funded by you know oil money. The irony is not lost on us in any way.
So I think Tor is right -- I think that the fact that Norway is exporting its carbon
footprint to other countries, it doesn't cancel out all of the wonderful
progressive green things that they're doing here.
This is a story about incentives and green infrastructure and a green society but it's also a story
about how fossil fuels continue to make the world go round.
I am tired and jet-lagged and haven't slept in like twenty three hours.
I'm gonna go to bed. It was a fun day chasing Teslas. Tomorrow, we go to the North Pole.