Norway is often held up as the shining example of electric vehicle uptake. Fair enough. It has achieved what most countries are still only talking about. In 2025, almost all new cars registered in Norway were fully electric. That is an extraordinary policy and market achievement.

But New Zealand needs to be careful about drawing the wrong lesson.

The lesson is not that Norway did it, therefore New Zealand can simply copy the headline target and expect the same result. The lesson is that Norway built its transition over decades, in a market with very different economic, fiscal, and vehicle-supply conditions. If we want to reach a similar destination, we need to understand the road they travelled — and the road we are actually on.

We are not Norway.

Norway has been able to support EV uptake with a long-running suite of tax exemptions, purchase incentives, toll concessions, ferry concessions, and infrastructure support. It also made petrol and diesel vehicles increasingly expensive. That was not a short-term consumer nudge. It was a long-term, consistent, whole-of-system policy direction backed by a wealthy state and high household purchasing power.

New Zealand starts from a different place.

We do not have local vehicle manufacturing. We do not control product allocation from factories. We do not have the same level of national wealth. We do not have Norway’s sovereign wealth fund. We do not have Norwegian wage levels, productivity levels, or GDP per capita. And most importantly for our sector, New Zealand has a split vehicle import system: new vehicles come through one channel, while used imported vehicles come through another.

For many New Zealanders, the used import channel is not a marginal feature of the market. It is the affordability engine. It is the pathway that allows households to move out of older, less safe, higher-emitting vehicles and into something newer, cleaner, and safer than what they currently drive. For a large part of the country, the realistic choice is not between a brand-new EV and a brand-new petrol car. It is between keeping an ageing vehicle for longer or buying a better used replacement.

That is where policy can get itself into trouble.

If we set standards as though every household can behave like a high-income Norwegian new-car buyer, we will not accelerate the transition. We will slow it down. We will make replacement vehicles more expensive, reduce choice, and encourage people to hold onto older vehicles for longer. That is the opposite of what good transport policy should achieve.

The Norwegian fleet also tells a more nuanced story than the headlines suggest. Norway is now close to total EV dominance in new-car sales, but its actual private car fleet is still far from fully electric. Petrol and diesel vehicles remain more than half of the private car fleet. If hybrids are included, the share of vehicles still carrying an internal combustion engine is higher again.

That point matters because fleets do not turn over overnight.

Even in Norway, after decades of deliberate policy, the fleet is still working through the legacy of previous purchasing decisions. That is not failure. It is fleet reality. Vehicles are durable goods. They remain in use for years. The transition happens through replacement over time, not by pretending the existing fleet disappears when a new target is announced.

New Zealand should still be ambitious. We should want more EVs. We should want more efficient hybrids. We should want cleaner vehicles, safer vehicles, and better transport choices. We should want policy settings that steadily shift the fleet in the right direction.

But ambition is not the same as punishment.

The risk for New Zealand is that we mistake pressure for progress. Every additional cost placed on imported vehicles has a behavioural consequence. If the vehicle that a household can afford is made unavailable or too expensive, that household does not magically buy a new EV. More often, it delays replacement. It keeps the current car on the road. That means older safety technology, higher emissions, and a slower rate of fleet renewal.

A realistic policy approach would start with the structure of our market, not with the structure of Norway’s.

That means recognising the new and used import channels are different. They have different supply chains, different price points, different consumer bases, and different levels of influence over what vehicles are available. Policy should not pretend they are the same. Nor should it punish the used import channel for not being able to perform like a new vehicle market in a high-income European country.

For the used import sector, the better approach is a sinking-lid model that progressively improves fleet outcomes over time. Standards should tighten, but they should tighten in a way that tracks actual supply, consumer affordability, and the practical availability of cleaner vehicles from source markets such as Japan. If models are cleaner than the market average, policy should help bring them here. If hybrids deliver meaningful emissions reductions and are available at prices New Zealanders can afford, they should be part of the transition rather than treated as a policy failure.

The goal should be fleet improvement, not policy purity.

A clean car standard that is too blunt may look good on paper but fail in the market. A standard that is too harsh can shrink supply, raise prices, and slow replacement. The better test is whether policy helps the national fleet become cleaner and safer faster than it otherwise would. That requires a practical view of consumer behaviour, household budgets, vehicle availability, and the realities of a small, distant, right-hand-drive market.

Norway shows what is possible when national wealth, fiscal policy, infrastructure, and consumer purchasing power all line up over a long period. New Zealand should learn from that. But we should not pretend we are starting from the same place.

We can still get there. We can still increase EV uptake. We can still support cleaner imports. We can still improve the national fleet. But we need policy that works with our market rather than against it.

For New Zealand, the transition will not be won by making affordable replacement vehicles harder to access. It will be won by keeping the fleet moving — steadily, affordably, and in the right direction.

We are not Norway. But with realistic policy, we can still make progress.