Yes, they buy some, with roughly the same percentage of new car sales being EV. However, those regions have a significantly higher percentage of households with multiple cars, and they have overall a significantly higher fraction of ICE cars in service than do the warmer areas.
This means you can't really make deductions about EV performance in very cold weather in those very cold regions without getting data on what the EVs are being used for. It could be most of them are in households where they have ICE cars to handle things where they need long range or when they need to tow or haul things, and the EVs are just used for things where loss of range and capacity doesn't matter much.
Probably has a lot to do with the incentives—tax rebates for EVs, taxes for ICE cars, cost of fuel, availability of fast chargers, etc. I’m glad Norway is pushing hard for greater adoption (and the US should too), but these things don’t make for a meaningful comparison.
Well no, and I agree with you - but I think it's a fair rebutal to someone saying that EV's can't work somewhere where it's really cold, like the only reason people in the northern united states or canada don't buy EVs is purely because of the cold - that's a factor, sure, but I think there's a lot of other reasons other than cold.
I’m the person to whom this rebuttal was originally made, and I did not say that EVs can’t work in the cold (I own one and I live in a northern state—they work, but not flawlessly).
I was only disagreeing with another commenter who claimed the status quo was fine. There’s a pretty big gap between “not fine” and “not workable”.
This means you can't really make deductions about EV performance in very cold weather in those very cold regions without getting data on what the EVs are being used for. It could be most of them are in households where they have ICE cars to handle things where they need long range or when they need to tow or haul things, and the EVs are just used for things where loss of range and capacity doesn't matter much.