When Jonette yen bought her first electric car, it turned heads. "Now nobody turns around!" she says with a laugh.
Sometime in April, Norway is expected to become the first country where one in every 100 cars is purely electric. One percent may not sound like a huge figure, but in the U.S., the equivalent number would be something close to .07 percent.
Driving around Oslo, it's a number that becomes quickly visible as yen interrupts herself every minute or two to point out another EV passing quietly by. Popular electric vehicles in Norway include the Think and Buddy, which are both produced by Norwegian car makers, as well as Nissan's Leaf and Tesla models.
This is all started years ago, when Norway had a fledgling electric car industry of its own. In an effort to boost sales and reduce emissions, the Norwegian Parliament put forth a very generous package of incentives to get its people off fossil fuel. The big one: no taxes. In a country where taxes can double or even triple a car's purchase price, that's huge.
Still, as Transport Minister Ketil Solvik-Olsen explains it, those were the days when electric meant "tiny, kind of plastic cars seating two people, where you would freeze to death during the wintertime." He says that while the pitch appealed to early adopters and environmentally conscious people, sales were not about to rise dramatically in snowy, mountainous Norway.
Parliament decided the tax break would end when the country's EV total reached 50,000, or in 2017, whichever came first.
By 2013, Norway's electric car industry had pretty much fizzled, but California-based Tesla was cranking them out, kickstarting other major automakers into action. With EVs on the market that some consumers actually wanted, suddenly those tax incentives became a lot more alluring.
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