Tesla registered 171 cars in Norway on Thursday, its busiest day of the third quarter and seven times the 24 it registered in the whole of July, according to Roland Pircher, who tracks the company’s registrations across European markets under the handle.
“I guess we’ll see some days in the next few weeks close to 500 units,” Pircher wrote on X.
His chart of the quarter shows Berlin-built Model Ys and Shanghai-built Model 3s carrying August, with the first meaningful batch of Shanghai-built Model Ys appearing in the final days before Thursday and making up most of the day’s total.
The push comes off the weakest two months Tesla has recorded in Norway since it became the country’s largest brand.
It registered 24 cars in July, 97% fewer than the 838 of July 2025, a month in which Toyota became Norway’s largest brand for the first time since May 2024 and Xpeng took third, and 627 in August, 79% below the 3,014 of a year earlier, according to OFV data.
Only 253 of the August cars were Model Ys, against 2,456 in August 2025, with the remaining 374 Model 3s.
August left Tesla seventh among brands with a 4.7% share of a 13,451-car market, and OFV said the Norwegian market would have grown 17% that month instead of shrinking 3.4% had Tesla been excluded.
The Model 3 was the seventh-best-selling car in August. The Model Y was outside the top ten.
The quarter Tesla is trying to recover is a large one. It registered 8,681 cars in Norway in the third quarter of 2025, 4,829 of them in September. Through August this year it has 651.
Matching last year’s quarter would need about 8,000 in September alone, more than Tesla has registered in any single month in Norway, where its record is the 6,215 of November 2025.
Pircher’s 500-a-day scenario would put a September in the range of the 6,150 registered in March, which was Tesla’s best month of 2026 and lifted its first-quarter total 95% above the year before.
The Pattern
The 2026 series is a quarter-end delivery cadence laid over a tax change.
Norway cut the VAT exemption on EVs from the first 500,000 kroner of the purchase price to the first 300,000 kroner on January 1, and buyers pulled forward into November and December 2025, the two strongest months in Norwegian new-car history.
Tesla registered 83 cars in January, 88% below the 689 of January 2025 and its lowest month in three years.
It then ran a 50,000-kroner “Tesla Bonus” and promotional financing from January 9 to March 31, and March produced 6,150, up 178% on the year, with the Model Y and Model 3 first and second in the national ranking and Tesla at 34.8% of all new cars.
February was 1,210, up 32% from 917. April fell to 379, 61% below April 2025, as the Chinese-built stock ran down. May was 3,345, up 29%, with OFV noting that Tesla’s volume “surged sharply towards the end of May” after several quiet weeks.
June was 3,222, 43% below a June 2025 of 5,646 that had been inflated by the same pre-tax-change buying that lifted the rest of the year, though Tesla still held a 16.5% share that month and the Model Y was the country’s best-selling car with 2,257, ahead of the Kia Niro and the Model 3.
The second quarter came to 6,946, 25% below the 9,222 of a year earlier, after a first quarter of 7,443.
The shape is Tesla’s established cadence, in which volumes spike at the end of each quarter as shipments from the German and Chinese plants arrive in bulk.
For the year, Tesla has 15,040 registrations through August, 11% below the 16,891 of the same eight months of 2025, and remains Norway’s largest brand.
Its lead over Toyota, at 11,300, has narrowed to 3,740 cars from 9,173 a year ago, with Toyota up 46.4%. Volkswagen is third at 9,606, down about a third from the 13,802 that had made it Tesla’s closest challenger at this point in 2025. Pircher’s count puts Tesla at 749 for the first ten days of September, which would take the year to 15,789.
The Base
Tesla’s 2025 in Norway was its best year in the country. It registered 34,285 cars, about 41% more than the roughly 24,300 of 2024, 19.1% of a record market, more than 10,000 ahead of Volkswagen, and the Model Y alone took 15.4% of all new cars with 27,621 registrations.
November’s 6,215 and December’s 5,679 were its two best months in the country, and the fourth quarter of 12,565 its best quarter.
OFV said in January there was “no doubt” the VAT change “spurred many people to buy a new electric vehicle before the end of the year.” That is the base every 2026 comparison is made against.
The Lineup
Tesla sells two models in Norway.
The Model Y comes from Grünheide and Shanghai in Rear Wheel Drive, Premium RWD, Premium AWD and Performance trims, from 389,990 kroner, about 390,000, with a seven-seat option on the Premium AWD at a 22,000-kroner premium since February.
The Model 3, all Shanghai-built for the market, is sold in Standard, Premium and Performance, with the Standard at 299,990 kroner, about 300,000, which sits at the new VAT threshold and is the reason the sedan has held its ranking better than the Model Y this year.
The Model S and Model X are no longer built. Production ended in the second quarter and both had been available in Norway only from inventory since the start of the year.
The Cybertruck has no EU type approval and is not sold in Norway. The 17 in the country as of January were parallel imports.
The Competition
The brands taking Tesla’s share in 2026 are Toyota, on the bZ4X, Urban Cruiser and C-HR+, Volkswagen, on the ID.4, ID.3 and ID.7, and the Chinese. Xpeng and BYD together went from 4.9% of the Norwegian market in August 2025 to 11.4% in August 2026, and Xpeng posted the strongest growth of any large brand after bringing its cheapest model to Europe.
BMW’s new iX3 was third in August in its first full month.
Fully electric cars were 98.7% of Norwegian registrations in August, a record, and 97.8% for the year, and Norway’s fleet passed one million electric passenger cars in June.
OFV’s Geir Inge Stokke said then that the transition was not complete, since “seven out of ten passenger cars on the road are still powered by gasoline or diesel.”
