My wife and kid are taking a trip to Iceland and Norway in mid December. I would prefer to rent an electric car but am slightly hesitant due to weather and needing 4 wheel drive/all wheel drive. From what I hear on the podcast, Norway seems to have more electric cars than people. I have no idea about Iceland though. Also, what is the charging infrastructure like? Again, I assume Norway is doing ok. Thanks for any advice! FYI- I currently drive an EV6.
A quick look on Plugshare shows an abundance (over 96)charging locations, the majority being DC in Iceland, looks like it should be no problem...enjoy the trip
Looking at this map, there seems to be a good number of chargers around the country. BTW, I noticed Hertz in Iceland also offers the Tesla Model Y, so that would cover the AWD question.
Thank you for your replies! This is one of those once in a lifetime/bucket list trips and we are so excited! Thank goodness for credit card rewards or this trip would of taken a lot longer to save for.
Norway is the leader in EV sales, number of electric cars and charging infrastructure in the world, so no problems there. Iceland is doing well too - way faster development there in North America excl. say California. I drove an EV in Finland this past summer, and made a quick video review of it. I had a great time. Though Finland's a bit behind Norway, it's easily ahead of Canada:
Thanks for taking time to make this video. Hopefully within too long Canada will catch up somewhat, however our biggest obstacle is trying to provide equivalent services throughout our vast territory. I think our charging network has improved substantially since I started driving BEV over 10 years ago, although more resources should be applied to ongoing maintenance to the existing infrastructure equally to the addition of new. As far as rebates, we are lucky in BC to have the additional incentives although it is capped "once in a lifetime per registrar", and the Feds are also doing a great job for the rest of Canada. Once Ontario EV/battery manufacturing is established, I suspect those missing provincial incentives may return, so don't give up hope
Thanks, Eddy. It's great to hear your perspective as you've been driving a BEV for so much longer than a newbie like me here. I was hopeful that we would get provincial rebates in Ontario again since both the Libs and the NDP were promising them in the last election, but the people re-elected the PCs. But despite the politics I think the charging infra is growing and getting better here all the time which is good to see.
One thing that I think I could’ve added to the video, unless it’s common knowledge is that in North America our houses have single-phase power systems whereas in Finland and I believe much if not all of Europe they get three-phase power in regular houses. This means that in Finland they can quite easily install max 17 - 24 kW chargers and thus faster charging at home while in Canada and the US we typically get 6.7 kw or so. Of course, this being AC power, it gets limited by the vehicle’s onboard charger which in the Tesla Model 3 for example is about 10 kw I remember, so a faster than 11 kw charger at home may not yet make sense depending on the vehicle. But with three-phase power homes in Europe are nevertheless more future proof.
