More than half new cars in Norway electric or hybrid

OSLO, Jan. 3 (Xinhua) -- More than half of the new cars registered in Norway last year were electric or hybrid, data from the Norwegian Road Federation (OFV) showed on Wednesday.

A total of 158, 650 new passenger cars were registered in 2017 and out of these 33,080, or 20.9 percent, were zero-emission cars -- mainly pure electric cars and a few hydrogen vehicles, the OFV said.

Meanwhile, a total of 49,736 gasoline/diesel-electric hybrid cars were registered, which accounted for 31.3 percent of the total new car sales, according to the OFV data.

Sales of diesel cars continued to fall in 2017 as focusing on the green shift, stricter emissions and taxes requirements are probably among the main reasons, the OFV said.

In 2017, 23.1 percent of all newly registered passenger cars had diesel engines, while the figure for 2016 was 30.8 percent.

There are now around 2.7 million passenger cars in Norway, in which pure electric cars constitute just over 5 percent, almost 150,000, according to OFV.

"There is every reason to believe that the sale of zero-emission cars will continue to increase in 2018 as more models, which have a longer range, will fit into the family segment and will be at a price level suitable for more," OFV director Oyvind Solberg Thorsen was quoted as saying in a press release.

"If the growth in sales of new zero-emission cars becomes the same as we think, that means that the proportion of new registered zero-emission cars in 2018 will amount to an estimated 25 percent of the total sales of new passenger cars," Thorsen said.

"Then Norway will still be in the top of the world in terms of sales of zero-emission cars in relation to total car sales," he added. Enditem