Norway considers banning gas-powered car sales
Electric vehicles have come a long way in the past decade and change since they first came on the mainstream market scene. Many accept that one day we’ll all be driving electric vehicles but for now gas is still king.
But that isn’t stopping Norway from hoping for the day gas cars are a thing of the past. A new proposal for banning the sales of gas-powered cars was included in the country’s 2018 -2029 National Transport Plan.
While the country hasn’t banned gas cars yet, they are committing to reducing the amount of new gas guzzlers sold while increasing the number of zero-emissions vehicles by 2025. Autoblog reports that they will limit the number of new gas car sales and increase alternative options including bike lanes in addition to incentives for electric vehicles such as subsidizing charging costs, allowing drivers to use bus lanes, and so on.
There are only about 150,000 new cars sold every year in Norway, so reducing their gas-powered vehicles isn’t actually all that difficult compared to Canada where about 2 million new vehicles are sold every year.
While there’s no guarantee Norway will ban the sale of gas cars, the idea of it appealed to Tesla CEO Elon Musk. Musk’s company has led the charge for making electric vehicles sexy and desirable to the mainstream crowd. In a couple of years the game-changing Model 3 will begin hitting roads and could help jump start a wave of truly affordable electric vehicles that cost $20,000 or less. It’ll be a while before we get there, and we’ll probably never see a Tesla for under $40,000 in Canada, but the possibility is out there and that possibility will make proposals like Norway’s all the more viable.