Driving an electric vehicle for a road trip can be challenging enough in the United States. Would this even be possible in a country like Costa Rica? I decided to find out.
Costa Rica has done more than most countries to promote electric vehicles, including passing a law in 2018 that required electric companies to install fast chargers every 50 miles on national highways. That and tax breaks have made Costa Rica a pioneer in electric vehicles. Now, nearly one in five new cars sold in the country is electric, a phenomenon I’ve come to report on.
Utilities typically installed only one charger per location. Chargers often don’t work, according to reviews on apps like PlugShare.
Costa Rica is one of the most prosperous and stable countries in Latin America, but many roads in rural areas are still unpaved. Some areas, including the one I visited, didn’t get electricity until the 1980s.
I rented a BYD Yuan, sold as an SF1 in Costa Rica, from Green Circle Experience, a company that organizes tours to hotels and resorts that follow sustainable practices.
The SF1, a small but capable SUV that retails for around $30,000, is popular in Costa Rica. Costa Ricans are buying electric vehicles three times faster than people in the United States, in part because of the availability of such cheap Chinese models that the United States effectively blocks with huge tariffs.
Green Circle suggests itineraries that include hotels with chargers. My three day rental and two nights was just over $700.
The folks at Green Circle encouraged me to visit a small hotel on the Pacific coast called Hacienda Barú, about 120 miles from San José, the capital. They thought I should meet the founder of the hotel, who is also Jack Ewing. (No relation as far as I know.)
When I got the car in San Jose, the dashboard estimated it could go 400 kilometers, or about 250 miles, before it ran out of juice.
San José is 3,800 feet above sea level, so the first part of the drive was steeply downhill. The car consumed almost no energy.
It was a warm day and I was driving with the windows open because I couldn’t figure out how to turn on the air conditioning. Like the dashboards of many Chinese cars in Costa Rica, the buttons and video display had Chinese characters. That’s because it was brought to Costa Rica from a dealership in China — making it what the industry calls a gray market import. If it were a regular import – sold by BYD to a Costa Rican dealer – the manufacturer would have made sure the controls were in Spanish. (I figured it out eventually.)
I arrived at the coast after about two hours with more than 80 percent charge. Then the road flattened out, passing beach towns and miles of palm plantations.
It was slow on mostly two-lane roads where the speed limit is 50mph and traffic was often backed up.
By the time I arrived at Hacienda Barú, a collection of bungalows surrounded by rainforest, the car’s battery had reached 50 percent. This meant I would have to recharge to get back up the hill to San José.
Hacienda Barú has a charger that could charge the battery in four or five hours, but I couldn’t get it to work. Eric Orlich, director of the Green Circle Experience, solved the problem in a way that illustrates the ingenuity required of electric vehicle owners in Costa Rica.
We moved my BYD close enough to run the charging cable through the window to a standard electrical outlet. In the morning, the battery was more than 80 percent charged. Then the hotel employee got the charger working so I could fill up the rest of the way.
I was talking to the other Jack Ewing who is retired but came to visit. Pausing for a game of dominoes, he told me how he moved from Colorado to Costa Rica in the 1970s to run a cattle ranch.
“I fell in love with the rainforest,” he said.
Gradually, Mr. Ewing allowed nature to take over the pastures and transformed the ranch into a resort where guests can spot coatis, monkeys, peccaries, sloths and the occasional cougar. Without really meaning to, he helped invent ecotourism, now a major industry.
Mr. Ewing didn’t say much about electric vehicles, but one reason the Costa Rican government is promoting the cars is to increase the country’s appeal to environmentally-minded tourists.
On the way back, I met Aramis Pérez, a professor of engineering at the University of Costa Rica and one of the country’s leading experts on electric vehicles.
He plugged his battery-powered Toyota into the only fast charger in Dominical, a nearby village popular with surfers. He said the car was drawing juice, but he couldn’t estimate how much because the car’s software couldn’t communicate with the charger. And the display on the charger didn’t work.
It was a lesson in the challenges of driving electric vehicles in Costa Rica.
Mr. Pérez has managed projects for the government, including one that helped airport taxi drivers switch to electric vehicles. It hopes to win a contract to assess the state of the national charging system. “For now, we’re doing it for free,” he said.
I followed Mr. Pérez as he performed inspections, noting deficiencies and opportunities for improvement. For example, in the city of Quepos, there was a charger in the hospital parking lot. Mr. Pérez noticed that there was nowhere to eat or get coffee, but it was safe.
The charger was designed to serve two vehicles, but the parking space was only big enough for one. The charger display was in English. “The good thing is that it works,” Mr. Perez said.
Costa Rica’s charging infrastructure is expected to improve as a new law allows electricity to be sold to businesses other than utilities. Energy companies supported the bill, even though it ends their monopoly on charging. Marco Acuña, CEO of Grupo ICE, the country’s largest energy company, said it didn’t matter if it sold electricity to consumers or charging station operators.
“We can sell a hamburger or we can sell a cow,” he told me.
I made it back to San José without needing a fast charger. This is the biggest reason why electric driving in Costa Rica is possible, if not always easy. I charged at night when I slept. In a small country, that’s usually all you need.
Jack Ewing
Automotive industry reporter
If you want to know what would happen if Chinese cars weren’t kept out of the United States due to tariffs, go to Costa Rica. Electric cars from Geely, Chery, BYD, Dongfeng, Xpeng and many others are everywhere, often selling for less than $20,000. It was a shock for me and I am writing about it. I came back saying that Western car companies are in big trouble if they don’t develop vehicles that can compete. Tariffs will not protect them forever.
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