An Empirical Analysis of Toll Road Exemption

The Norwegian government has employed a wide range of incentive packages for promoting the purchase and use of electric vehicles including EV toll exemption. However, currently many people (including many politicians) would consider the market to being close to maturity and therefore expect the government incentives to be removed or updated. With this background, we assess whether the Norwegian EV toll road exemption is significant in promoting EV sales. To accomplish this, we mainly use monthly data on EV sales, toll cost and toll traffic and apply panel data regression method with city, year and month fixed effects. The time range of our analysis is 2010¿2015. Our results show that EV toll exemption is insignificant in promoting EV sales in the three cities we consider: Oslo, Bergen and Stavanger. This is true whether you estimate users/drivers saving/cost from EV or non¿ EV perspectives. Furthermore, we find that charging stations, unemployment, income and vehicle kilometers are significant predictors of the sales of EV. But, in contrary to our suspicion, we did not find any significant rebound effect due to the change in consumer driving behavior.