Drive one and you never go back, with one in five new cars sold in Norway last month a Chinese brand

Chinese brand cars accounted for 22.5 percent of new passenger car registrations in Norway in October, a record monthly high, according to data released by the Norwegian Road Federation on November 2, which means roughly one in every five new cars sold in the country last month carried a Chinese badge.

Registrations of Chinese brands reached 3,534 units in October, nearly double the 1,879 of the same month last year, and the 22.5 percent share beat the previous record of 22.1 percent set in July.

By brand, XPeng registered 932 cars in Norway in October to rank fifth among all brands, BYD registered 816, and Changan jumped from 15 units a year earlier to 339, the fastest growth of the group.

Geir Inge Stokke, head of the Norwegian Road Federation, said Chinese brands have become a fixed part of the Norwegian car market in a short space of time.

Two years ago those brands were still making what amounted to a tentative entry, and they now hold close to a quarter of the market, a pace of penetration far faster than outsiders had expected.

The wider market grew just as sharply, with 15,725 new passenger cars registered in October, up 41.2 percent year on year and the highest for the month in more than 30 years, and battery-electric cars took 98.8 percent of those registrations, which means Norway's new car market is now almost entirely electric.

Against that backdrop, a 22.5 percent share shows Chinese EVs can compete head-on with established players such as Tesla and Volkswagen on product strength rather than on price alone, since the share was won in a market where virtually every rival is already selling electric cars rather than one still dominated by combustion models.

Norway, as the country with the highest EV adoption rate in the world, has long been treated as the bridgehead for Chinese automakers entering Europe, and the collective breakthrough by XPeng, BYD and Changan gives those brands a strong reference point for pushing into larger European markets next.