IN JULY, 97.6% of every new car sold in Norway was fully electric. Not “mostly electric with some hybrids thrown in” but fully electric.

Petrol and diesel cars are now so marginal in Norway’s new car market that when 12 petrol cars were sold there in a single month earlier this year, it made international news.

Electric cars have already overtaken diesel on Norway’s roads, and close to a third of the country’s entire vehicle fleet—not just new sales, the whole fleet—is now battery electric.

Most of the main manufacturers don’t even bother importing petrol or diesel cars to the country anymore.

I’ve spent a lot of this year writing about Ireland’s own EV numbers. We just hit a genuine milestone ourselves: electric cars overtook hybrids in July to become Ireland’s single most popular new car choice, on 26% of year-to-date registrations.

It’s real progress, and it puts us ahead of markets like Italy, Spain, and the UK. But set next to Norway, that 26% looks small in comparison. And it’s worth asking why.

The answer isn’t really about electric cars at all, but it’s about what happens when a government picks a policy and then, almost uniquely among governments anywhere, sticks with it for three decades without flinching.

It started with a pop star and a stolen Fiat

The most unlikely detail in the whole story is where it actually began: not in a government department, but with a converted Fiat Panda and one of the biggest pop bands on the planet.

In 1989, Norwegian environmental campaigners Harald N. Røstvik and Frederic Hauge were struggling to get anyone to take electric cars seriously, so they recruited A-ha—fresh off Take On Me and the Bond theme The Living Daylights—to help.

They imported a Fiat Panda that had been converted from petrol to electric (28-mile range, 48-hour recharge time, back seats ripped out to fit the batteries) and used it to stage seven years of deliberate civil disobedience: driving through toll booths without paying, parking illegally, refusing vehicle taxes, and getting the car impounded and bought back........

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