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On his most recent trip to Bolivia in August, Mexican Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard drove a Quantum brand electric vehicle manufactured in the Andean nation through the streets of La Paz.
The exhibition was to announce that, starting in 2023, the car will be manufactured on a "scale" in its country thanks to the partnership between the Bolivian company and the Mexican Industrial Power.
“It will be the cheapest electric vehicle in our country.
Congratulations!!”, he wrote on his Twitter account.
The head of Foreign Affairs pointed out that the electric vehicle sector is going to have "exponential" growth, since Mexican regulations establish that by 2030 a large part of its vehicle fleet must be electric.
Apart from the Bolivian startup Quantum, established in 2019, other countries have joined the path of decarbonization and “electrification”.
The substitution of vehicles that operate with fossil fuels for electric cars, to achieve a low-carbon economy, also has supporters in Argentina, with companies such as Volt Motors, Coradir, Sero electric;
in Mexico there is Zacua;
Luka in Guatemala and Mobilis in Brazil, among others.
According to the fourth edition of the
Electric Mobility report.
Advances in Latin America and the
Caribbean –from the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP)–, the year 2020 was disruptive in terms of transportation.
In the midst of the health, economic and social crisis due to the covid-19 pandemic, sustainable mobility has become even more relevant as a central element for improving the quality of life and the resilience of cities in the face of unprecedented events.
Gustavo Máñez, deputy director for Latin America and the Caribbean at UNEP, sees a “positive change in trend” more than two years after the pandemic was declared.
“The sale of electric and hybrid cars in general has been going up a lot, more than in previous years.
In Colombia, for example, the increase in internal combustion vehicles is very representative, from 2019 to 2021 it decreased by 4% and in the sale of electric and hybrid vehicles it increased by 300% or 400%.
This gives us a signal that not only is there a vision of the need or importance of air quality, but that the market is also really seeing it,” Máñez told América Futura.
Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard inside an electric vehicle of the Bolivian brand Quantum during his official visit to the South American country last month. MarceloEbrardC (RR. SS.)
"It is a path that has no turning back," says Andrés Alcalá, coordinator of the urban mobility and sustainable urban logistics strategy at CAF - development bank of Latin America.
China is the main supplier to the world market, but Latin America is beginning to develop this market, the expert explains to América Futura.
And he takes the example of Mexico and Brazil that, by tradition, have had a leadership in the production of vehicles.
According to him, it is important that they not be left behind in this trend of technological transformation and more sustainable mobility through the supply chain, since "a greater derivative of the supply chain makes the possibility of investing and growing up".
“New players are emerging, new vehicles that technology allows to be able to compete to a certain extent with them [the large automakers] and it is a very interesting opportunity for many of the countries like Argentina, like Bolivia, which are developing some prototypes and some production vehicles. national production”, adds Alcalá.
In 2021, 118,191 hybrid and electric vehicles were registered in Latin America, an increase of 107.1% compared to 2020 – when 57,078 were registered –, according to the National Association for Sustainable Mobility.
Of that total, 6,011 were fully electric vehicles, 7,887 plug-in electric hybrids and 104,293 electric hybrids.
The country where the most electric and hybrid vehicles were registered last year was Mexico with 47,079 units, followed by Brazil with 34,990 and Colombia with 17,702.
The fine print that makes implementation difficult
Both specialists see an opening in Latin America and that there are public policies and incentives to buy this type of vehicle in the region, but that there is still a "fine print" that conditions for a complete implementation.
Alcalá affirms that in order to get past this stage of pilot tests and to understand electric technology, elements such as public infrastructure for public charging of cars and incentives that translate into the adoption of low-carbon technologies in vehicles for public use are necessary. intensive or high-mileage buses such as buses for public use, but also institutional and commercial fleets used in urban logistics or in the public sector.
For Máñez it is contradictory: although there are incentives for the entry of electric vehicles, the fossil fuel subsidy in the region is still a factor to be taken into account.
According to estimates by the International Monetary Fund, in Latin America and the Caribbean, 46,000 million dollars are paid each year in subsidies for fossil fuels.
“You have on the one hand all these incentives for electric cars like priority parking, freeway use and free charging.
I would love for everyone to be able to travel with an electric vehicle tomorrow, but I know that is not the case and the subsidy responds to social implications that cannot be ignored.
I do not think that it responds to a lack of desire or a lack of vision of the politicians,
Another factor is prices.
Both agree that it is a segment with costs that are relatively expensive.
For example, according to article 36 of the Mexican Income Tax Law, the purchase of cars will be tax deductible in two cases: up to an amount of 8,760 dollars (at the current exchange rate) when its operation is through of rechargeable electric batteries and up to 12,505 dollars when they have an internal combustion engine or a hydrogen-powered engine.
However, the price range for electric cars in the North American country ranges between 17,151 and 169,257 dollars.
Máñez says that many of the vehicles that arrive in the region are “very high-end” for the middle class that can afford a conventional gasoline car compared to a Jaguar, Porsche or Tesla electric vehicle.
“The price can be three times more than what a gasoline vehicle can cost today and derived especially from the cost of the battery input.
There is still a gap that does need to be filled.
However, on the maintenance and use side, it is clearly an advantage.
Operating an electric vehicle is much cheaper, due to factors such as the useful life, of what is called the total cost of ownership in the sector, but the initial investment is still a barrier”, adds Alcalá.
A branch of the American electric car brand, Tesla, on the street full of luxury stores called Av. Presidente Masaryk, in Mexico City.Cesar Rodriguez (Bloomberg)
Another edge that plays an important role in this issue is lithium and its industrialization.
Bolivia has the largest reserves in the world and, together with Argentina and Chile, the "triangle" makes up 63% of the reserves on the planet.
Máñez considers that the industrialization of this resource is a relevant factor for the takeoff of the electric mobility industry in Latin America.
“No one wants to return to that extractivist economy in which value was not added to our countries and added to others.
The lithium industrialization process and the entire value chain that this can generate is very important to reinforce national production.
But it is also necessary to take into account all the possible environmental impacts and how to minimize them so that, at the end of its production,
Likewise, they consider it important to look in the short term at the movements and measures that the different countries and regional governments are taking, such as that of California, in the United States, which has decided to ban the sale of gasoline cars as of 2035. This in reference to a scenario in which developed countries begin to establish important incentives to buy electric cars.
Given this situation, Máñez considers it important to think about the regulations that the nations that are recipients of second-hand vehicles from the US are going to put in place.
“Thanks to the entire electrification process, it will give us a chance to make the transition much faster to better vehicle efficiency.
Those who are now with a vehicle from the year 2000 will find it much easier to make the transition to one from 2019 or 2020. Internal combustion vehicles are not going to disappear from the world in two or three years, but we do not want them to be everyone go to Central America and that they take another 15 years to move towards electric mobility because new vehicles entered from all over the world.
Everything is closely related and not because a benefit appears in one place is a detriment in another”, concludes Máñez.