Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland and Iceland lead the European race towards the electric car, the only countries on the Old Continent with more than 20% all-electric cars. Ahead of them all is Norway: it has 74% of its car fleet made up of battery-electric cars, and wants to achieve zero emissions by 2025. The market share is so high that Hyundai in Norway has decided to sell only electric or hydrogen cars. Iceland (34%), Sweden (30%), Denmark and Finland (20% each) follow. There are several reasons for the Norwegian supremacy: incentive policies (subsidies, discounts on parking, tolls and ferries, use of bus and taxi lanes); the highest number of charging stations per resident on the continent (Oslo had more than 43 points per 10000 residents and Bergen 37), with 17000 charging stations and columns, including 3300 fast-charging ones; an infrastructure endowment that covers even the most extreme, sparsely populated and coldest areas of northern Norway; the heavily taxed purchase of polluting petrol and diesel cars. Increased use of electric and hybrid vehicles reduces the impact of the transport sector on the environment: the European cities with the lowest road emissions per resident are Riga, Copenhagen, Oslo, Bucharest, Zagreb and Paris. The city with the worst values is Luxembourg. Today there are almost 20 million electric passenger vehicles, 1.3 million electric commercial vehicles and more than 280 million electric mopeds, scooters and motorbikes on the road worldwide: estimates predict a global market share for electrified cars of more than 50 per cent in 2030.
