EVwire brief: Norway's greenhouse gas emissions fell to 44 million tonnes (48.5 million US tons) of CO₂ equivalents in 2025, their lowest level since 1990, with Statistics Norway (SSB) pointing to the growing number of electric cars as a key reason behind the latest decline.
Final figures from SSB show emissions dropped 1.9% from 2024, a cut of about 0.8 million tonnes (0.9 million US tons). Compared with 1990, Norway's emissions are now 7.2 million tonnes (7.9 million US tons), or 14.1%, lower.
SSB laid out what drove the past year's numbers in both directions:
"The decrease in greenhouse gases compared to 2024 is largely due to increased use of electric cars. However, 2025 was also a year of greater activity in industry than the previous year, which resulted in higher emissions and dampened the reduction."
The road traffic drop came even as Norwegians covered more kilometers on their roads in 2025 than in any year before. SSB data show road traffic emissions fell to 7.11 million tonnes in 2025, down from 7.74 million tonnes in 2024 and from a peak of 10.29 million tonnes in 2015, a 31% decline over the decade.
Here's how Norway's emissions have changed by source since 1990, as per SSB data:
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Norway's emissions have been on a clear downward path since 2015, with most of the cuts coming from road traffic and the oil and gas sector, the same two sectors that drove emissions up in earlier decades. The country's emissions peaked in 2007, when they were 10.2% above 1990 levels. Over the past five years, emissions have fallen by an average of 2.2% per year, the largest cut of any five-year period in SSB's records.
Here's how each five-year period compares, as per SSB:
Norway's road traffic gains follow more than a decade of rapid EV adoption. Battery-electric cars made up 5.5% of new passenger car registrations in 2013 and 54.3% in 2020, before reaching 95.9% in 2025, as per the Norwegian Road Traffic Information Council (OFV). The share has climbed even higher this year, sitting at 98% through October, and 2025 was also the year electric cars outnumbered diesel cars in Norway's overall fleet. The country's EV story goes back decades, all the way to a stunt by pop band A-ha.
Here's how Norway's EV share has grown, as per OFV data:
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Context:
Tesla has gained more from Norway's switch than any other automaker. It registered 34,285 new cars in the country in 2025, a brand record worth 19.1% of the market, and 27,621 of them were Model Ys, a new single-year high for any model in Norway. That momentum has carried into 2026, with Tesla leading all brands on 21,523 registrations (16.4%) through October and the Model Y's 17,647 units more than tripling the runner-up Toyota bZ4X. October also gave Tesla its strongest October in Norway yet at 1,548 cars, months after the Model Y became the first car to cross 100,000 registrations in the country.
Tesla's run builds on groundwork laid by other brands. The Nissan Leaf spent years as Norway's top-selling EV and had logged more than 76,000 registrations by late 2022, ahead of every other electric model, with Volkswagen's e-Golf in second on the all-time list. Volkswagen carried that early lead into its ID family, as the ID.4 finished as the country's No. 2 car in both 2021 and 2022. The German automaker was again Norway's second-biggest brand in 2025 with 23,858 registrations (13.3%), followed by Volvo at 7.8%, Toyota at 5.8% and BMW at 5.6%, as per OFV.
The newest challengers come from China. Chinese brands took 13.7% of Norway's new car market in 2025, up from 10.4% a year earlier, with BYD the biggest of them in 10th place overall on the strength of its Sealion 7. Their share has kept growing this year and hit a monthly record of 22.5% in October, when the XPeng G6 ranked fourth among all models with 542 registrations.
Source: Statistics Norway (SSB), Allt om Elbil, OFV
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