Norway is a peculiar ‘business case’ in itself: living off its fossil energy’s proceeds to subsidize its own clean car program. Norwegian oil and offshore companies recently protested their government’s ban on drilling in the arctics. You might say that Norway has a direct interest in car makers continuing the production of fossil-fuel cars. However, there is an ‘addresses-all’ solution to this: reduce vehicle footprint. The need to subsidize electric vehicles, simply because they will need a lot less of those costly batteries, will disappear then. The thing is that politicians aren’t aware of how this works, and car makers only change their attitude if they can be certain that purchase of their electric cars will be subsidized through EV tax credits. For ride-hailing companies like Uber ‘reduce vehicle footprint’ would make a lot of sense too, since the average trip constitutes 1.2 passenger.

The core problem with cars is that they are too wide and too heavy to be considered efficient transportation, particularly during the daily commute when most of us sit alone in their car that weighs 20–30 times as much as the average person, is wider than that person is tall.