Tesla to accelerate its market entry in Iceland, says Elon Musk

Tesla has been significantly expanding in Europe over the last few years, but it never officially made it to Iceland.

Now Elon Musk says that Tesla will expedite its entry into the market.

Iceland is perfect for massive adoption of electric vehicles. The island’s electricity generation is already almost 100% renewable, which makes EVs super clean, and being a remote island, petrol is expensive.

Albeit being sparsely populated with only ~350,000 people, there’s a significant concentration of population around Reykjavík and people have relatively short commutes that can be covered with most electric vehicles.

It helped the country increase EV sales over the last few years and while we are only talking about a few thousand plug-in sales last year, it represents over 15% of total cars sales in the country, which is higher than in most other markets around the world.

While there are a few Tesla vehicles in the mix, they were imported by the owners since Tesla is not officially in the country, but that could change soon based on what Musk told a Twitter user last night:

Thanks for letting me know. Will expedite. Sorry for the delay.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 5, 2018

That’s a sneaky way to represent the situation as a comparison between those markets.

When Tesla entered Denmark, it was a booming market for electric vehicles and Tesla sold thousands of vehicles there in 2015 before they removed their EV incentives.

They changed their policies, which put a halt to EV sales in the country, but they are expected to pick back up at some point.

Finland is probably a better comparison. There were actually more plug-in vehicle sales in Finland than in Iceland last year, but if you account for only all-electric vehicles, Iceland indeed has a bigger market despite having less than a tenth of the population.

To be fair, Tesla hasn’t invested heavily in Finland, where they only have one store and service center as well as a handful of Supercharger station.

A similar investment in Iceland could be expected with a store and service center in Reykjavík a few Supercharger stations to enable Tesla owners to travel around the island.

ABB recently won a contract from Reykjavik Energy’s ON Power, the country’s largest electric utility, to install 15 new fast-charging stations across Iceland’s main highway.