One in Four Norwegian EV Owners Would Avoid Tesla on Politics. A Year Ago It Was Four in Ten.

The Norwegian EV Association published its annual owner survey, Elbilisten, on 25 September 2026. The finding that matters most to Tesla is a number that fell: 24% of Norwegian electric-car owners say they would avoid buying a Tesla for political reasons, against 43% a year earlier.

Nineteen points in a year is a large movement for a brand-perception figure, and it runs opposite to the line drawn around Tesla in Europe since 2025.

Three lines, two directions

The third row ties the other two together. Political brand avoidance fell overall by ten points in the same year that scepticism toward Chinese brands rose by eight — which reads most economically as Tesla's nineteen-point fall driving the whole decline, with the rise in China scepticism too small to offset it.

The fieldwork is from spring, not from now

Elbilisten ran from 31 March to 3 May 2026 and collected close to 15,000 responses. The 2025 comparison was gathered the same way a year earlier.

That is the caveat to carry out of this article. Spring 2025 was near the peak of the Tesla backlash in Europe, so the survey measures the distance between one high-water mark and the following spring — not between last week and this one. It establishes that boycott sentiment receded over twelve months. It does not describe October.

Saying and buying are different activities

The Chinese half of the survey carries its own contradiction, and the association pointed at it directly. Between January and July 2026, Chinese-owned brands took 20,566 of Norway's 81,041 new electric registrations — just over a quarter of the market, against roughly nothing in 2019.

So the share of owners who say they would avoid Chinese cars went up, and the share of the market Chinese cars actually took went up with it. Stated reluctance is not a purchase decision.

Christina Bu, the association's general secretary, tied the scepticism to data rather than to trade: new cars are "i praksis kjørende datamaskiner" — in practice rolling computers — and when data security and privacy get more attention, it is natural that more buyers care where a car comes from and how its data is handled. In a few years, she added, China has gone from "a curiosity in the Norwegian car market" to the second-largest single supplier of new electric cars to Norway.

What this leaves Tesla, in Norway and in Europe

Sentiment is no longer the binding constraint here, which makes September's result harder to explain away. The Model Y was Norway's best-selling car again last month on 4,810 units, while Tesla's share of the market fell from 33.7% to 26.3% in a market that grew 31%.

A brand losing share while the proportion of people refusing to consider it on principle nearly halves is losing to competition, not to politics. That is a different problem, and on these numbers a growing share of it arrives from China — the same shift visible in Chinese brands' record 11.7% of the European market in August.

No other European market has published the same question twice. The most recent German reading found half of the Germans who reject Tesla blaming Musk's politics, with no later wave to compare it against. Norway has two readings a year apart, and the gap between them is the story.