Norway has released its December and full year 2025 automotive sales numbers and the world’s leading EV haven has broken records once again. The country had previously targeted an end to fossil car sales in 2025, and it basically got there.
In 2017, Norway set a formal non-binding target to end fossil car sales in the country by 2025 – a target earlier than any other country in the world by several years. Norway was already well ahead of the world in EV adoption, with about a third of new cars being electric at the time – but it wanted to schedule the final blow for just 8 years later, fairly short as far as automotive timelines go.
At the time, many (though not us at Electrek) considered this to be an optimistic goal, and figured that it might get pushed back.
But Norway did not budge in its target (unlike more cowardly nations). And it turns out, when you set a realistic goal, craft policy around it, and don’t act all wishy-washy or change your mind every few years, you can actually get things done.
So, already by 2021, it looked like Norway was on track to have basically no fossil-only vehicle sales – though with various stragglers, including hybrid vehicles.
And now, the final blow has basically been struck, as Norway has reported its annual numbers showing a record year for car sales with virtually all of them being electric.
Norway meets its 2025 goal with virtually no new fossil cars
Norway’s transport statistics agency OFV released its year-end numbers today, with 179,549 new passenger cars registered in the country in 2025. That total includes 172,232 fully electric vehicles and 2,751 plug-in hybrids, meaning 95.9% of cars sold in Norway have no fossil power at all (up from 88.9% in 2024), and 97.5% have a plug.
The remainder of vehicles were 2,306 conventional gasoline hybrids (without a plug), 1,773 diesels, and a grand total of just 487 gasoline (petrol)-powered vehicles. This means a total of 1.3% of vehicles sold in Norway in 2025 had no traction battery. The country also registered 0 hydrogen cars in 2025 (down from 9 in 2024).
But those are full-year numbers, and December numbers were even more stark. While the all-electric share was 95.9% for the full year, it was 97.6% in the final month of the year. That’s a vanishingly small percentage of non-electric vehicles.
The fossil cars mostly consisted of “specialised vehicles such as wheelchair-accessible vehicles or those used by police and other first responders, alongside a few hybrid models and sports cars,” according to Reuters.
The end-of-year surge in EV sales was helped by retiring incentives. Earlier this year, Norway declared victory on its 100% EV goal, and changed the generous incentive structure that had helped the country reach these heights.
The incentive will now be reduced for more expensive EVs (those costing over 300k NOK, or ~$30k), which led to a rush to buy higher-priced EVs, including Teslas. As a result, Tesla sales are up in Norway, bucking the company’s global trend of cratering sales numbers in a rising market as CEO Elon Musk does his best to ruin the company.
Tesla closed out the year as Norway’s top-selling car brand, beating regional strongholds VW and Volvo. 19.1% of Norwegian cars sold in 2025 were Teslas, and the Model Y remained the best-selling model by a wide margin, selling over 3x as many units as the second place VW ID.4.
Chinese EVs also saw growth in the country, with Chinese brands’ market share rising to 13.7% from 10.4% last year.
EVs now outnumber diesel cars on Norway’s roads
Importantly, one other milestone was met in the last month. Last year, we reported that there were more electric cars than gas-powered cars on Norway’s roads, as of September 2024. New car sales are all well and good, but the actual goal is to get polluting vehicles off the roads and replace them with ones without a tailpipe, so it was a big milestone for EVs to outnumber petrol-only cars.
But that one had an asterisk: there were still more diesel cars on the road than EVs at the time.
Now, as of last month, that’s no longer true. OFV also announced that electric cars overtook diesel cars on Norway’s roads in early December, meaning that EVs are now the plurality vehicle in the country, making up 31.78% of the fleet. Diesels are 31.76%, gasoline cars are 23.9%, and hybrids are 12.56% altogether.
As more EVs get sold and as fossil and hybrid cars get retired, those numbers will only get better and better for Norway.
But even with this victory, Norway isn’t ready to sit still. OFV director Geir Inge Stokke took the moment to remind everyone that “two out of three passenger cars on the road still run on fossil fuels.. so even though this is an important milestone, we must continue working towards an emission-free vehicle fleet.”
He also notes that fossil-car holdouts might be the hardest to convince, so work still needs to be done to convince those drivers to retire their vehicles and switch to a cleaner alternative. In particular, Stokke also pointed out that those holdouts seem concentrated in particular regions, like remote Finnmark, where only 86% of new cars sales were electric (that said, the even more remote Svalbard is doing alright with electric mail vans).
And, after demand was pulled forward by retiring incentives, it’s possible we could see a hangover and a tick down in EV sales percentage in the next few months (or, maybe better, a move towards more compact and budget EVs). Though penalties and taxes for combustion engine vehicles remain high.
We’ll have to wait and see how much the incentive structure changes things, but with EVs effectively taking over the country, it seems unlikely that fossil cars will fight back all that much.
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