Text | Karakush
Lando announced that Lando Free will start deliveries in Norway in the fourth quarter.
This is a big step for Lantu, a small step for Norway.
In 2022, a Norwegian can buy a variety of Chinese electric vehicles in the country: MG ZS, Chase Eunic5 and Eunic6, Xiaopeng G3, P7 and P5, Hongqi E-HS9, NIO ES8 and ET7, BYD Tang, and perhaps even the Polestar 2 and the upcoming Polestar 3 SUVs.
They landed intensively within two or three years, quickly making Norway the country with the largest number of Chinese electric vehicle brands outside of China.
Norway is not a regular export destination for Chinese car companies, but the Middle East, Latin America, Africa, Southeast Asia and Russia. No matter where it is, it is not "far away from the curse", but it looks like some persimmons are specially picked and soft pinched.
The onlookers could not help but have some questions: for example, Norway, a small country in the north, can sell a few cars, and what can be proved by selling them? With China's status today, the people have higher expectations for "raising the prestige of the mainland" than simply going abroad.
Starting from this question, Norway is not so much a vacuum belt that is easy to encroach on for China's electric vehicles, a bridgehead comparable to Poland, but also a wild test field, in which the competitiveness of Chinese electric vehicle products and brands can be fully verified.
If a Chinese electric car brand can survive in Norway, it may survive anywhere.
As long as the money is in place, you can also be very environmentally friendly
What is Norway's indicator?
It has the highest penetration rate of electric vehicles in the world, with the highest proportion of electric vehicles, with a population of 5.4 million and 500,000 people driving pure electric vehicles. It is indeed a small market, with 176,000 new car sales for the whole of last year – already a record-breaking scale, just the size of a quarter in Shanghai. But 65% of them are pure electric vehicles, and 22% of them are plug-in hybrids, in other words, only 13% of new cars are fully unplugged fuel vehicles.
The local government expects that the penetration rate of new electric vehicles will step to 80% this year, and the growth rate will be very fast. From 1% in 2011 to 65% in 2021, Norway has spent a decade, and it seems that there is only a matter of time before 100% is reached. Norway's original goal of becoming the first country in the world to stop selling fuel vehicles by 2025 will now be achieved ahead of schedule.
Such high penetration rates are seen as the biggest background for the emergence of exports, which can lead to many favorable conditions for the Norwegian market to play very well:
Norway has a full life cycle policy support for electric vehicles;
Norwegians are intoxicated with environmental protection and are electric five cents that bring their own dry food;
Norway has a long history of electrification and complete charging infrastructure;
Norway lacks a local car industry and is fair and friendly to foreign brands.
The one that really matters and is enough is the first one, which even helps establish other advantages, including environmental awareness – you can love the environment very much as long as the money is in place; as long as the money is in place, I can love anything very much.
Counterexamples such as in the commercial vehicle and rental market, Norway has planning loopholes, rewards and punishments are low, so the proportion of electric vehicle registration is only 37.3%, in 2020 new car sales accounted for only 20%, compared with the electrification process of private cars is much slower.
Norway itself is not a place that can easily trigger a transport revolution, it is located in the Arctic Circle, with rugged mountains and a cold climate. Some claim that Norway has a temperate maritime climate with a pleasant climate – you can't measure the temperature by the way you feel in a mink. In January, the average low temperature in Oslo is -7 °C, and the average high temperature is -1 °C, not to mention the northern suburbs.
According to NAF's 2020 test of 20 commercially available mainstream electric vehicles, they lost an average of 20% of their range in winter and only maintained 70% at worst. "Selling electric cars to Norway is actually similar to selling them to the three eastern provinces." This is Norway's natural challenge to electric vehicles.
Today's national electric is the result of a strong manual intervention and policy intervention, including but not limited to, exempting electric vehicles from 25% purchase tax and import tax on the one hand; increasing the carbon tax, weight tax, nitrogen oxide tax and other pollution taxes of nearly 20% for traditional fuel vehicles on the other hand.
For example, Volkswagen has introduced two versions of golf in Norway, with the import price of 22,000 euros for the fuel version and 33,000 euros for the pure electric e-Golf (discontinued in 2020); under the tiger tax, the retail price of the fuel version is as high as 34,000 euros, while the electric version only needs 33,000 euros (scrap fee).
This is just the cost difference up to purchase – it has made electric vehicles still overwhelmingly price competitive compared to the fuel vehicles produced next door, even if they are included in the cost of transportation across the ocean.
In addition, electric vehicles also enjoy exemption from tolls, allowing the use of bus lanes, half price or even free parking and so on. For details, see energypost.eu cost comparison of the Volkswagen ID.4, Toyota RAV4 Prime and RAV4 sold in Norway:
Big head: VAT, withholding tax, various usage charges, and fuel taxes. It is worth noting that Norwegian electricity is not cheap, and the cost of electric vehicles and fuel economies in the cost of electricity and fuel itself is not much different, but the electricity tax is much lower than the oil tax.
No matter what kind of electric vehicle, the relative cost of comprehensive purchase and use is that it cannot be bought and deceived. So that last year, Norway's hot TOP20 models, still with the engine of the product only Toyota RAV4, Volvo XC40, Volvo XC60, they all provide pan-new energy version, to the end of last year Volvo even canceled the XC40 plug-in mixed version, in Norway only sell pure electric version.
This makes Norway the only market for electric vehicles in the world:
First, it leads the world in providing an inflection point after the competitive sandbox, electric vehicles do not compete with fuel vehicles, and electric vehicles and electric vehicles compete fully. Coupled with the fact that there is no threshold for entry, attracting the latest models to test the waters in Norway, it is difficult to see such colorful diversity outside of China, and it also gives Chinese electric vehicles an affordable opportunity to test and test before entering the mainstream European market.
Second, it temporarily smooths out the system gap, and brands/companies with weak strategic closed loops will not expose shortcomings.
For example, the energy replenishment system is sound - the Norwegian pile conditions are sufficient, the infrastructure is rapid and surplus, all the main roads are built every 50 kilometers to build charging stations, by the end of 2020, the number of charging piles is more than 18,500, the number of piles is small, and there are an average of 35 charging piles for every 10,000 Norwegians. This guarantees the endurance of all electric vehicles.
Most electric vehicles can then make a more "fair" and direct product face-to-face.
Third, it provides consumers with mature minds and open minds to electric vehicles. They have a full understanding (enough tolerance) to drive/own an electric car, and they are far from loyal to an electric car, such as the Norwegian market in 2018 with Nissan Leaf, the Tesla Model 3 in 2019 and 2021, and the Audi e-tron in 2020.
The market welcomes better and cheaper alternatives, leaving a rising channel for new products and brands.
Fourth, in the short term, only Norway can provide such an environment, which is an irreproducible example because the path is very expensive. Although some countries have surpassed Norway's phased speed, such as Norway's share of electric vehicles rising from 2% to 10% in 2.5 years, the United Kingdom only 1.5 years, germany only one year; but their progress to 60%, 80% or even 100% will encounter bottlenecks.
Norway's acceleration has a unique premise: it has no local automobile industry, so there is no cost of industrial transformation (compared to no local competition, no burden is the real advantage); at the same time, as a large oil and gas country, its hydropower accounted for 68% of energy consumption, 99% of electricity is low-carbon energy, and there is no large energy transition cost. Mainstream countries need longer apportionment times.
At the same time, acceleration always comes at a greater cost. Norway is based on oil and gas exports to rich countries, and then sets up a sovereign fund to invest in returns, providing capital for the country's new energy. Although local electric vehicle industry associations insist that tax exemptions and incentives do not cost as much as subsidies in general, the Norwegian Ministry of Finance estimates that the tax exemption costs the country about 30 billion Norwegian kronor (about $3.33 billion) in fiscal revenue.
Labour, which won last year's general election, plans to gradually impose a 25% VAT on expensive electric vehicles exceeding NOK 600,000 (US$66,600) starting in 2023. The starting point of this center-left ruling party is social justice. In the past, the higher the price, the more tax exemptions, and the cheap was taken away by the rich.
Now Norway has many options in various price points and segments, and there are enough equals for not wanting to pay taxes, but like Tesla S/X, Porsche, BBA will be affected. Overall, Norway's commitment to "zero emissions" remains unchanged, and the policy advantages of electric vehicles over fuel vehicles will not end anytime soon.
China's rudder is still the home of Europe
Such a market environment is not the happy planet of China's electric vehicles.
First, Norwegians don't care about brands – it's impossible. Norwegians don't have local brands, but until a decade ago, Norwegians' favorite car brands were Volkswagen and Toyota. Since the 1980s, Volkswagen has dominated the Norwegian brand, and by 2017, the market titles are usually golf, Passat, and occasionally snatched by Toyota Corolla.
The Norwegians' openness to electric cars is reflected in Tesla. Last year, Tesla Model 3 sold first, making Tesla's market share reach 11.6%, surpassing Volkswagen by 9.6% for the first time, and becoming the largest brand in Norway.
The mainstream on the hot selling list is still old. The second is the Toyota RAV4 and the third is the Volkswagen ID.4. The vast majority are European brands such as Volvo, Peugeot, Citroën, and even Skoda. Norway doesn't treat all brands equally, and clearly has preferences and traditions, but relatively no local obsessions and prejudices.
Second, the presence of Chinese brands is not high.
There are two Chinese brand electric vehicles on the list: PoleStar 2, which sells 4103 vehicles in the whole year, ranking tenth; and MG ZS, which sells 2538 vehicles in the whole year, ranking twentieth - it should be Polestar 2 and MG ZS to be exact. Both brands have deep European roots, and for consumers on the European continent, they may know that they are brands of Chinese capital, and few will really think of them as Chinese brands.
The delivery data outside the list is very vague, and in line with the principle of louder and better performance, the strongest performer is BYD, which announced in December last year that it would deliver more than 1,000 Don EVs (priced at 599,900 crowns) in Norway, with an annual target of 1,500 units.
Other press releases that can only be exported, a glimpse of a little trace:
FAW said it received orders for 500 red flags in September last year;
Xiaopeng delivered 100 G3s at the end of 2020, exported another 209 G3s by February last year, and began exporting P7s to Norway in August last year, no data;
Weilai also did not announce the number of deliveries, they admitted that sales will not be comparable to China, but provided another perspective: 25% of Norwegians will place orders after test drives, which is much more efficient than in China. Li Bin revealed that there is a lot of backlog of orders, but hopes to control the delivery speed in the initial stage. The internal goal is to keep users happy.
One explanation is that China's electric cars didn't go away for long. But the Model Y was actually delivered to Norway until the second half of last year, with annual sales of more than 8,000 vehicles, ranking fourth; Hyundai IONIQ 5, delivered only a few months ago, sold 3557 vehicles in the whole year, ranking twelfth.
This has nothing to do with the landing time of the model sooner or later, but in the final analysis, it is the international popularity of the brand. In the case of BYD, it only started delivering the first car in August last year, and the performance was actually very good, which was inseparable from the international reputation, and it had the endorsement of Berkshire Hathaway. It is conceivable that Xiaopeng and Weilai may still be electric vehicles listed on the "New York Stock Exchange", otherwise they are Chinese brands that have never been heard of at all.
Chinese star companies going to sea may inevitably have to accept the problems encountered by Volkswagen and Peugeot in China: how can the electric vehicles that sell well in Europe not work in China - in the past, some friends believed that it was because the Competition in China's electric vehicle market was more intense, and European cars could not be beaten, but the fact would not be just a localization problem. Domestic, out of may not be good, in addition to Tesla two ends of the blossom, everyone will be beaten.
The opportunity lies in whether Chinese electric brands can quickly adjust their European strategies to meet local lifestyles, travel scopes, and consumption habits in terms of their own advantages, such as data operation and model innovation.
To go out, you must go out
Norway is often the first step in the international strategy of China's electric vehicle companies. For many young companies, through this step, they can accumulate the initial experience of global brand operation and lay the foundation for the subsequent international market.
There must be a follow-up. For example, Lantu will gradually enter other European countries and gradually enrich its overseas product layout; WEILAI will enter four European countries this year and begin to establish after-sales service centers and data centers in Europe; Xiaopeng's first direct-operated experience store in Europe a few days ago was officially opened in Sweden and planned to be launched in Denmark and the Netherlands.
Its significance is not only that the company itself expands the market - the pattern is narrow, starting from the purpose, the depth of the market is still large domestic demand, or the third world.
It is important to make a test of the ten-year curve overtaking of China's auto industry: Has this industrial experiment been successful? Whether so much investment in electric vehicles, so anxious industrial chain and energy transformation, so many people's youth and middle age, is enough to promote competition with the traditional automobile pattern, whether it is qualified to become a world-class automobile industry, this is something that cannot be proved behind closed doors.
China has been seeking to boost auto exports. But until the electric car, we may have the opportunity to accelerate.