- Norway’s car market got closer than ever to being all-electric in August.
- Nearly 99% of passenger car sales in the country were EVs last month.
- Volkswagen and Toyota
Norway’s goal is for all passenger car sales to be electric, and it’s now closer than ever. According to the Norwegian Road Traffic Information Council, 13,451 new cars were registered in August, a 3.4% drop from the same month last year. But a whopping 98.7% of those new cars were electric. That’s a record, even for EV-happy Norway.
“The passenger car market is declining somewhat, but the development varies significantly between brands. Several major brands are growing, and competition for car customers has become more even,” said Geir Inge Stokke, CEO of the Norwegian Road Traffic Information Council (OFV), in a press release.
So, which EVs and brands are the most popular in the world’s EV capital? Despite Tesla still being Norway’s best-selling brand for 2026 so far, it dropped to seventh place last month. Tesla sold 627 cars, making up 4.7% of the market. Interestingly, the best-selling EV brand in Norway was Volkswagen, with 1,457 cars sold, accounting for 10.8% of the market.
Photo by: Patrick George
Toyota had the second-best August, with 1,328 cars sold, or 9.9% share. That keeps Toyota in second place for the year, and awfully close to Tesla’s top spot. Toyota’s sales have increased by 46.4% so far this year, as Tesla’s dropped by 11%. BMW and Volvo came in third and fourth, while China’s Xpeng came in fifth.
Just like in other European countries, Chinese brands are moving fast in Norway. Xpeng and BYD more than doubled their market share in August, to 11.4% from 4.9% during the same month in 2025.
As for individual models, Norway’s best-selling vehicle in August was the Volkswagen ID.4. This might come as a surprise for American customers, seeing as the ID.4 is extinct in the U.S.. Coming in second place was the awkwardly named Toyota bZ4X, followed by the brand-spanking-new BMW iX3 in third. Tesla didn’t even crack the top five, with the Model 3 coming in seventh place.
Norway’s 98.7% EV market share record is impressive. But it’s really just the continuation of a years-long trend. For years, Norway has consistently and deliberately leveraged its vast oil wealth to wean its citizens off of gas cars—by offering tax breaks and other incentives that made EVs cheaper to own. In 2025, EVs claimed 95.9% of the country’s car sales.
Still, it’s remarkable to see Norway inch closer to becoming an entirely-EV country. EVs even made up 53.1% of work vans, up 12.1% from last year. So it isn’t just commuters and city-dwellers buying EVs, it’s even laborers. Consequently, sales of combustion vehicles of all types are dwindling fast.
In August, Norwegians bought just 30 gas cars, which made up 0.2% of the market. They scooped up 31 gas hybrids and 45 gas plug-in hybrids. The best-selling powertrain apart from EVs was diesel vehicles, with 64 sales, or 0.5% of the passenger car market.
“The new car market is now practically all-electric, and once again a record is being set in the share of electric cars. Further emissions cuts therefore increasingly depend on how quickly older petrol and diesel cars disappear from the existing car fleet,” Stokke said.
