2021 has been a big year already for electric vehicles with yet more evidence of the shift from fossil fuel-powered cars to EVs.

It’s already happening in Norway, for example, where it was announced that 2020 saw it become the first country in the world to sell more electric cars in a year (54% of all cars sold) than petrol cars.

That was amazing news to kick-start this year and Norway is well on its way to being the first country to end the sale of petrol and diesel cars by 2025.

But what else has been going on so far this year?

More charging points are being added, all the time

For the UK to replicate Norway’s success we need to make sure we’ve got the infrastructure to allow people to use EVs so news, like we saw in Durham County Council in January, is always encouraging.

They announced that they plan to install 100 EV charge points across the county in the next 15 months, aimed at helping people without off-street parking to access a charging point near their homes.

However, the Policy Exchange think tank has warned the Government that the roll-out of new charging points has fallen behind what’s needed.

A new report says that we’ll need 400,000 points by 2030 and only have 35,000 right now.

The Government has already announced a further £20m in funding for local authorities, with another £1.3bn to be spent on this over the next four years.

So watch this space.

Charging for free!

Speaking of which, Elinor Chalmers hit the news for exactly that reason in February when the savvy Scottish EV driver spoke to the BBC about how she’d managed to find free public charging points near her flat in Dundee: "The majority of the chargers across Scotland were free and I think in those first three years, I saved about £5,000 equivalent of what I would have been paying in diesel,” she said.

Car markers going electric

Of course, when it comes to EV news, one brand and particularly its founder are never far away from the headlines.

Tesla announced that its fourth quarter of 2020 results showed record deliveries of EVs (180,570 vehicles), with shares surging by 700% for the year despite the pandemic.

But plenty of big car brands are making big strides into this market in 2021.

In February, Jaguar announced that it will be all-electric by 2025, with electric versions of all Jaguar Land Rover vehicles being available by 2030, when the UK ban on the sale of new petrol and diesel cars kicks in.

In March, Volvo followed suit, saying that it will only be selling electric vehicles by 2030, even phasing out hybrids. Its chief technology officer, Henrik Green, put it simply: "There is no long-term future for cars with an internal combustion engine."

Ready to upgrade your car in 2021? Check out what’s hot in 2021 and find our most popular EV deals here.