Understanding lithium demand, page-315

Boom in Model 3 sales pushes Norway Tesla numbers to 40,000

An explosion of Model 3 sales since the lower-priced EV was released on the Norway auto market has seen the total number of Tesla electric cars on the road in the Scandinavian country soar to just over 40,000.

Norway is already hailed as the leader in electric car market share, with one out of every two cars sold in the first quarter of 2019 said to have been electric.

At the time, the Model S accounted for around 20,000 of Tesla vehicle registrations since its introduction in 2013, and there were nearly 12,000 Model X registrations made since it was released on the Norwegian market in 2016.

Now, well in the second quarter of 2019, the arrival of the highly anticipated, more affordable Model 3 has pushed the total number of Tesla vehicles past 40,000, with nearly 8,000 Model 3s registered in little over three months.

In March alone – the first full month the Model 3 was available – 5,315 Model 3s were registered, no doubt as reservation holders clambered online to order their long-awaited “mass-market” electric sedan as soon as possible.

Sales of Model S and X vehicles have understandably suffered as a result, as the statistics kept at teslastats.no shows.

Black is the favoured colour for Norwegians for all three models – as the standard colour it is the cheapest, but it wouldn’t be a stretch to assume black would be a positive in a country so characterised by its cold climate (as opposed to Australia’s hot climate where it is the exact opposite).

The Model 3 remains the most popular electric vehicle sold in Norway in 2019, ahead of the Volkswagen e-Golf with just under 5,000 registered and then the Nissan Leaf with about 3,700 registrations to date.

According to the Norwegian Information Council for Road Traffic (ofv.no), Norway’s overall average carbon emissions per vehicle for its entire fleet is 69gm/km, down 10gm/km since May 2018.

At the end of May, the entire market share for electric cars in Norway reached 35 per cent, up from 22.3 per cent from May 2018.



Mazda confirms 100% electric car model for 2020

Mazda CEO Akira Marumoto has confirmed the Japanese carmaker will make a 100 per cent electric vehicle to be released by 2020, as part of a wider push towards electrification.

Great news – only last week we reported Toyota’s decision to team up with Subaru in a turnaround from its “self-charging hybrid” campaigns, to develop an electric drivetrain platform that both carmakers would use in future EV models.

At the time we noted that Mazda seemingly was choosing to skate on thin ice with its plan to electrify its vehicles with “rotary range extenders”, making use of its considerable investment in rotary engine technology.

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While at the time Marumoto said the company would plan to introduce a BEV by 2019, it now appears that in Europe at least that won’t come to fruition now until next year.

And while Mazda did in fact ink a deal with Toyota in 2017 to develop electric car technology, this partnership has not yet delivered any fully electric vehicles, and the model Marumoto says the company will introduce next year is not born of this partnership either.

“We are jointly developing a new EV architecture with Toyota, but we will first introduce our own EV on a Mazda architecture in 2020,” Marumoto told Europe Auto News on Thursday.