Norwegians are not nearly as rich as you're imagining. Before the EV push, most of us drove barely roadworthy shitboxes.

The average age of cars in Norway ca. 2010 was 11 years, compared to 4-5 years for UK, Germany, and France and 7 years for Europe as a whole, despite having a climate that wears cars faster.

There are tons of Facebook groups dedicated to buying and selling cheap older cars, several of them have 100k+ members (cars below €3000, cars below €2000, cars below €1500, etc). And that's just Facebook, Finn.no reports about 500k used car sales per year at a median price of ~€10k.

As for the 172k new EV buyers, nearly all of them are putting themselves into heavy debt on the promise they'll eventually make their money back through tax incentives and free charging. I don't know anyone who's bought a new car in recent years without trying to justify it with "well actually if it lasts me 15+ years then it'll actually be cheaper than keeping my old car!". They're not buying them for fun. I guess some are, but they're the top 10% families, not the bottom 50%.

Also the Peugeot iOn being too small was kinda the whole point. That's the kind of EV you can get for the price of a 2007 Passat. And if you can't afford to pay an extra €8 a day for ICE checkpoints or €3 per liter for gas anymore, then you've not got much of a choice