PLACES: Vehicle spotting in Norway and Sweden

In the last weeks, me and my wife flew to norway to undertake a 2 week roadtrip thourh southern sweden and norway, but i’ll show you more off the lovely fjords and forest roads in a different posts soon. In this post we’re gonna focussing a bit on carspotting. I didn’t put any focus on this and i missed a lot of opportunities to grab a shot here and there, but here are just some random examples of cars, ships and airplanes we met along the way.
First we went 4 days to Oslo, the Capital of norway. Aside from beeing a beautiful city, i realized, how many electric cars actually are driving around in noway. Almost every third car or so was a tesla, even in the most rural areas we came along you’llsee many electric cars.
It seemed like the chinese manufacturers are keen to get a piece of that cake, but you rarerly saw any of those cars on the road. However the spint significant amount of money on advertizing:

Every big chinese manufacturer had a showroom in the best shopping adresses of Oslo and when i saw this car from the outside we had to step in and have a look.

To be honest, i think i’ve heard the name NIO before, but wasn’t aware of what they make. Turns out the chinese company they makes (electric) cars. Aside from their standard cars, they had this EP-9 electric supercar on display, which i have to admit looks damn good.

And also this “EVE” concept car:

Which had some cool interieur details

And somehow i particularly liked the finned taillight design:

In comparison, this Honqi car on display in the Oslo Gardemoen Airport looked way more like the typical thrown-together design elements from random european cars, which you would expect from a chinese manufacturer:

As a little opposite, to ecologic cars, there were some tanks on display in the old fortress in the Oslo harbour, which also houses a military history museeum. I didn’t want to spend the nice day inside, so we just had a look at the two tanks outside:

The first one obviously beeing a small tank and the second one an armoured personnel transporter:

In the harbour, you would find this old M314 “Alta” Minesweeper ship, which used to be in in operation after the WWII and most likely was used to clear the coasts after the war. It is also part of the above museeum.

As a tech-geek i like the rugged army things but i’m not especially into army stuff. But i had to take a few pictures of the german fregate F224 “Sachsen Anhalt” when it anchored in the harbour of Oslo on the second day of our visit.
Even though beeing a small warship it is impressive in it’s size.

The other day there was a big ceremony on the ship with NATO flags, limousines, marching band, security check and all. I guess it was some sort of a celebration of the recently finished NATO manouvers in the nordic sea:

I have no clue what this is, but you have to love the sound of an old propeller airplane.
UPDATE: This is a Douglas DC-3. According to the Oslo tourist website, you can book a public sight-seeing flight in it around oslo 🙂 Kudos to reader Krisztian for the Input!

Oslo has – aside from the huge Leisure and container harbours also multiple huge marinas, and at one place we ran into this speedboat which looked rather fast:

Also in oslo we accidentally ran into a wedding ceremony, and this old RollsRoyce was waiting for the bride and groom to leave in style.

After Oslo we took our rental car. We had originally booked something bigger, but with electricity at the airport area of the car rental beeing in a complete blackout, we got a smaller one instead.
I have to admit this little Yaris drives beautifully, but (and i had a similar age toyota recently, which was exactly the same): Please Toyota, do your homework on the navigation – What a shitty system…

It wasn’t the sporty GR version or something, but hell the fuel economy was superb with 3,5l on 100km of up’s and downs and we had some spiritited driving on the mountain passes 🙂

We took the car to visit my family in sweden, and as usual, you will find a lot of vintage american cars in sweden:

At the day of the midsommar festivities a lot of nice cars came for a cruise to the beach-site where we went for a swim. I only managed to get a photo of this one:

Sweden, especially the Vesteras area has a big spot for american muscle cars, limousines and hotrods. i think it hosts the biggest rockabilly and american car events outside america, with cars coming from all over europe to this event…
At one point we even saw a full-out lowrider truck with all the fancy paintjob, hydraulics, etc, but i didn’t have my cam ready.

Later in the Stavanger port, famous for beeing Norways largest oil export port, we met this thing below. I thought it was an oil platform in construction but a later googling of the name, revealed this is a rather special vehicle. The Heerema “Sleipnir” is worlds largest semi-submersible crane vessel. And worlds first ship fuelled by LNG in 2019! To get the size, just look at the to the black ship towed to it directly in front of it. this thing is huge and you could see the massive cranes already from very far away…

On our way back to oslo we met these guys with an old Jaguar, a nice volvo and a VW Beetle.

The same Volvo i saw again later at a different spot. Speaking of those, i was surprized to see how many old, nice restored volvos were out. You would of course expect this in scandinavia, but in my recent visits up there i don’t think i’ve ever seen so many on the road. Nice to see they get their deserved love.

This really only shows a small fraction of what we saw, but it gives you a little impression on what to see in scandinavia. Next i’ll put together a post about our lovely roadtrip through forest, fjords, drives along many lakes and over a mountain pass in norway. stay tuned!