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How do we make the move to electric cars happen? Ask Norway | John Naughton
Two-thirds of all new cars bought by Norwegians last year were electric. Turns out you just need a government with a clue
I’ve just been standing for 10 minutes at a moderately quiet junction near where I work in Cambridge. During that time I’ve seen six electric vehicles (EVs) – three VW ID.3s, a Nissan Leaf, a Nissan white van and a Renault Zoe. Three years ago, if I’d been standing at the same spot, I’d have seen precisely zero such vehicles. And what that brought to mind was Ernest Hemingway’s celebrated reply to the question: how does one go bankrupt? “Two ways,” he said. “Gradually, then suddenly.”
Something similar is going on in relation to adoption of EVs in Britain. The hockey-stick graph is common in consumer technologies. We saw it in the early years of mobile phones, when text messaging was ignored by adults as an inferior form of email. But when pay-as-you-go tariffs arrived and teenagers could have phones, SMS use suddenly shot skywards. The arrival of kids represented a tipping point – a point in time when a group rapidly changes its behaviour by widely adopting a previously rare practice.
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