Norway has had the highest uptake of electric cars in Europe and in recent years, electric car sales, mostly fully electric, have accounted for over half of all new purchases.

Petrol and diesel sales will be phased out in 2025 or 2026 and Norway will transition to an all-electric fleet sooner than any other European country.

This has been achieved through very generous – and costly – subsidies, including straight grants, VAT exemption, lower ongoing charges (tolls, parking) and of course, the avoidance of fuel taxes.

Norway can afford the cost, courtesy of its enormous revenues from oil and gas and there may be an element of hypocrisy – we earn lots of revenue from fossil fuels, but hey, we spend it on electric cars!

Regardless, the experience of Norway is very interesting for other countries which are at an earlier stage in the same process and there are lessons to be learnt.

The first is that it pays to have lots of hydropower – 88% of all power generated in Norway is hydro and another 10% comes from windfarms, so the payoff to electrifying the road fleet, in terms of emissions reduction, should be attractive.

Norway has got lucky on the double, since the hydro reservoirs act like free batteries, a store of electricity

Ireland, unfortunately, has used up whatever hydro opportunities nature saw fit to provide. Norway has got lucky on the double, since the hydro reservoirs act like free batteries, a store of electricity.

A recent study of Norway’s experience from the International Monetary Fund (working paper 162 of 2021) paints a complicated picture. Norway has invested heavily in charging infrastructure and has good availability, relative to population, even in remote areas.

But take-up has been strongest in better-off households and annual mileage for each electric vehicle is about 10,000km, versus 12,000 for ICE cars (ones with Internal Combustion Engines).

The reason is that multi-car households that have one electric vehicle tend to use it more sparingly, perhaps because the ICE car is still seen as a safer bet for the longer journeys. Range anxiety remains a factor, even with good coverage of charging points.

Despite the subsidies, electric cars are expensive and a strong secondhand market takes time to emerge. Prices for new electric cars are expected to fall towards the end of the 2020s, but cheap secondhand electric cars are a long way off.

At current prices for new cars in Ireland, cheaper used ICE cars will continue to be imported from the UK

This is a serious constraint on electric adoption in countries like Ireland, where the lower- and middle-income groups are not big buyers of new cars any more than they have been in Norway. But adoption began early, and a broader secondhand market has finally developed.

At current prices for new cars in Ireland, cheaper used ICE cars will continue to be imported from the UK, the only other country in Europe which drives on the left, and many of them are older diesel models.

There is nothing serious that can be done about this

The IMF study concludes that, even with generous subsidies, the transition to an electric car fleet takes decades, must start with new car buyers and that means with higher income groups. The subsidies on the face of it are regressive. There is nothing serious that can be done about this – it is not possible to manufacture new used cars, and the regressivity must be treated as an unavoidable cost of the transition.

The Norwegian data also show that the state has not been getting a great bang for its buck with the electric car subsidies. Emissions per car have fallen, but they were falling anyway with the improved fuel efficiency of the newer ICE models, and the cost to the Norwegian treasury for each unit of emissions reduction has been steep.

This is even more of a risk in a country like Ireland, where only about 40% of electricity is from renewable sources, versus almost 100% in Norway.

Earlier this year, during the blackout scares, there was no renewable output at all for a while, so those shiny new electric SUVs were burning gas, or even coal, disguised as electricity.

Clearly, every new car buyer who goes electric should help reduce emissions, but the IMF authors stress that this all depends on what mileage the new electric car proceeds to do and what happens to the ICE car which has been replaced.

The real breakthrough comes when cheap, secondhand electric models become available in the price brackets that most people can afford when they change cars

In Ireland, it would be smart to target the subsidies at high-mileage motorists, but the car distributors testify that sales are easier in the wealthier suburbs of Dublin and Cork, where we know that mileage is lower.

The real breakthrough comes when cheap, secondhand electric models become available in the price brackets that most people can afford when they change cars.

There is a welcome willingness to choose electric, but emissions savings will disappoint for many years. Why not go easy on the subsidies and wait for a supply of used electric cars from the UK?