Also, why any dirty looks at all? Here in the States, I find people hanging out of pickup trucks to give me a thumbs up.
People are envious of the incentives. Envy is big in Scandinavia. See the law of Jante, as referenced in the previous post. Society is very egalitarian here, and if some people suddenly drive around in luxury cars, people get suspiscious and envious.
Environmentalist say it's wrong that EVs are VAT free when bikes are not. However, the VAT exemption was created to support the development of new, more environmentally friendly transportation, create a market, get the technology mass produced to get the economy of scale running so that EVs would become price competitive with polluting cars. Bikes don't need that. Lower prices on bikes won't increase usage in a cold country like Norway and it just won't create radically better, more environmentally friendly bikes.
Some bus drivers want the EVs out of the bus lanes, complaining that there are so many EVs now that some buses use 10 minutes longer to get into Oslo.
Some environmentalists complain that the CO2 footprint of an EV isn't all that much lower than a petrol or diesel car, if they add the CO2 footprint of producing the car. Thus, we have endless debates regarding CO2 footprints of batteries, refining oil into petrol and diesel, NOx and nano-sized diesel particle emissions creating toxic clouds in major cities in the winter, etc.
Some economists point out it would be cheaper to buy CO2 quotas and not use them than give incentives to rich people buying luxury cars. But then again, the price of European CO2 quotas are unsustainably low.
Some economists have been calculating the loss of tax revenue by allowing all these luxury cars to be sold without taxes and VAT. Highly dubious calculations, as most Norwegian Tesla buyers wouldn't have afforded the car even with VAT added to the price, much less with 50-100% tax added.
Some hardcore political bicyclists are against EVs because they think there enough cars in the city centre already, and they fear EVs use of the bus lane will make more people drive into city centre rather than use public transport.
Leftists think it's wrong to give incentives to rich people who can afford to buy new cars.
This has all been compounded by the sheer size of Tesla's success. I honestly thought they'd sell around 500 Model S the first yea, and I laughed when celebrity environmentalist Frederic Hauge spoka at the Elon Musk visit in spring 2013, and promised to make the Model S the most sold car in Norway. And I'm an fanboy.
I guess it's easy to give advantages to a very small group of weirdos driving tiny experimental cars, and some something completely different else when 20% of all new cars are EVs and half of them are american luxury cars which doesn't look even remotely pitiful.
It's not that people are massively against Teslas or EVs here. Far from it. Most are positive. The word of mouth goes around. People see that their friends, relatives, neighbour, collegaues are happy with their EVs and thus it's not a scary experiment to buy an EV here.
Instead of kicking EVs out of the bus lane, politicians are considering creating an EV only lane on the E18 motorway in addition to the bus lane, reducing the number of lanes for pollutant traffic. That would increase the EV sales quite a lot.