Tesla was losing Norway in october. Then came the last six days
For 18 days in October, Tesla registered 125 new cars in Norway. Toyota, a brand that sold 62 cars there in October last year, looked like it would win the month.
Then the deliveries landed.
Between October 26 and 31, Norway registered 1,074 new Teslas, nearly one in five of all new passenger cars in those six days. When the count closed, Tesla was the country's top brand with 1,548 registrations and a 9.8% share, just 55 cars ahead of Toyota on 1,493. Volkswagen was third with 1,308. The numbers come from OFV, the Norwegian road traffic information council, which compiles the official registration figures.
On Tuesday morning Elon Musk reposted a chart of Norway's largest car brands this year, with Tesla's red bar sitting well clear of the field. The chart is right. The more interesting story is underneath it.
How Tesla wins a month it was losing
Tesla does not sell cars the way other carmakers do. It ships to Europe in waves, and deliveries bunch up at the end of each quarter, when the company is chasing its quarterly number. The first month of a quarter is usually quiet. NotATeslaKiller, an EV site that tracks the Norwegian data, points out that Tesla logged just 627 registrations in Norway in August and finished fourth, before jumping to almost five thousand in September.
October should have been another quiet one. Citing daily figures from the Tesla site Teslant, NotATeslaKiller says Toyota was still ahead on October 29. Tesla registered 212 cars in the last two days of the month against Toyota's 130, and took first place.
It was Tesla's best October ever in Norway, up 130.7% on a year earlier and past its previous October record of 1,348 cars in 2024.
"Only 55 cars separated the two biggest brands in October," OFV's chief executive, Geir Inge Stokke, said in the council's release (our translation). "The fight at the top is tight, and car buyers have many new brands and models to choose from."
One car does the work
Almost all of it was one model. The Model Y was Norway's most registered car in October with 1,429, up 141% from a year earlier. Second place, the Toyota bZ4X, managed 725. The Model 3 added 119.
Over the first ten months of 2026, the Model Y has 17,647 registrations, more than three times the bZ4X in second place with 5,570.
Where the cars came from
The detail Norwegian car writers keep coming back to is the factory. According to the trade site Bilnytt, as cited by NotATeslaKiller, almost every Tesla registered in Norway through October 29 was built in Shanghai, with only a handful from the Grünheide plant outside Berlin. A year earlier, most came from Germany.
The likely reason is trade policy. A China-built Tesla entering the European Union pays an extra countervailing duty. Norway is not in the EU, so that duty does not apply there. On that reading it makes sense to send Shanghai cars north and keep Berlin's output for EU buyers. OFV's figures do not record where each car was made, so treat this as press analysis rather than a confirmed Tesla strategy.
The year is closer than the chart
Musk's chart shows Tesla first for the year, and it is: 21,523 new cars from January to October, a 16.4% share of the market. But that is 3.9% fewer than in the same period of 2025.
The brands behind it are moving faster. Toyota is second with 14,126, up 79.7%, helped by new electric models such as the Urban Cruiser and the C-HR+. Volkswagen is third with 12,096, down 26.7%.
The real growth is Chinese. More than one in five new cars sold in Norway in October, 22.5%, came from a Chinese brand, the highest share OFV has ever recorded in a single month. The number nearly doubled in a year, from 1,879 to 3,534 cars. XPeng was fifth in October with 932 and has more than doubled its sales this year. Changan went from 15 cars to 339.
"More than one in five new cars is now from a Chinese brand, and the number has nearly doubled in a year," Stokke said. "In a short time the Chinese brands have gone from challengers to a permanent part of the Norwegian car market. The established brands are noticing."
The country that already switched
None of this is a fight between electric and petrol. In Norway that fight is over. Of the 15,725 new passenger cars registered in October, the most for an October in more than 30 years, 98.8% were electric. Just 189 were not fully electric, among them 89 diesels and 14 petrol cars.
There are now 1,062,008 electric cars on Norwegian roads, 36.1% of all passenger cars. That also means nearly two in three cars on the road are still not electric, which is OFV's point: the new-car market has flipped, the fleet has not.
For Tesla, Norway is a useful early warning about what an electric market looks like once everyone has caught up. Every brand sells an electric SUV. Toyota builds good ones. Chinese brands are arriving with a lot of choice, and they are taking share. Tesla still wins, but in October it won by 55 cars and a well-timed end-of-month delivery push.
In the most electric car market on earth, the Model Y is still the car to beat. It just has company now.
_Image: a Tesla Model Y in Sandvika, Norway. Photo by Andrzej Otrębski, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0._
