Country went 100% electric vehicles overnight with a drastic approach | Hacker News Reader

Country went 100% electric vehicles overnight with a drastic approach

electrek.co

16 pointssudenmorsian15 comments

I recently spent a week on an island with almost no ICE vehicles. I saw one small ICE tricycle utility vehicle — all the other vehicles were pushbikes, electric scooters, and horses with carts. No road noise apart from the horses hooves and the occasional bicycle bell. Very pleasant.

Interesting, but it seems like this really only affects consumers, since commercial vehicles will still use diesel. And the fact that they're almost certainly going to get all their EVs from China... hmm, I wonder who or what really convinced the government in Laos to go for this?

Well, the article mentions:

> The country runs almost entirely on hydropower and has built its export strategy around selling electricity to its neighbors. But it imports every drop of the fuel its cars burn, and that fuel bill is paid in foreign currency Laos is chronically short on. Every gas car swapped for an electric one runs on domestic hydro instead of imported diesel. That’s the whole game.

My issue with this, as I've been thinking about buying an electric car in the U.S., is that until I own a home where I have a garage, I don't have a place to charge an EV. I'm wondering, then, in Laos, what the charging story will actually be once these vehicles are purchased.

Lots of on street/car park charging, if there is government will it does not seem like much of a problem.

The charging situation largely depends on where you live, as I see electric chargers all over the place (mostly shopping areas, but also at hospitals) and I don't even live in a big city. I don't know if that's true for your area, but Google Maps will usually show it.

For Laos though, I do hope they'll make sure to expand their charging infrastructure. I've heard enough stories of governments trying to push EVs but not bothering to provide the infrastructure for it or providing incentives for companies to do so.

See if there are any places you frequent that have high speed chargers.

If you can pick up 200 miles of range in a quick grocery shop - or some other errand you run frequently - you really don't need a slow charger at home.

My local parks have low speed chargers and I almost never come home with less charge than I left when I go there. The high speed chargers at my local Costco mean that I haven't even gotten to the back of the store before I can have 100 miles of range added.

If charging speeds were still where they were 10 years ago, you might need a home charger. If you have access to modern infrastructure (not a guarantee in the US) you don't need a home charger any more than you need a home gas pump.

We have an EV and I figure we will save about $5k or more per 100,000 miles on the fuel costs, but that savings is flipped to a loss if I had to use fast charging all the time. But I'm using $3.50/gallon gas in that math. In Laos gas is almost double that, and electricity is much less than in my math. I get $0.07/kWh at night, but average residential in Laos is $0.031-$0.004 per kWh, so there's a roughly 4x relative advantage based on those price structures. Google says public charging in Laos is between $0.11 and $0.16 per kWh, which means someone using public chargers there would likely still be saving money over a similar gas vehicle.

[I asked google for those prices, so my estimates above are only as good as what Gemini gave me]

The car market seems tiny in Laos and Ethiopia (the other nation noted in the comments with a similar ban). It doesn’t seem large enough for an in country industry (maybe one factory if that) if this data is accurate and sales trends continued. https://laotiantimes.com/2023/06/06/laos-imports-over-80000-...

Laos is a fairly small country with 7.5m people, nestled in between Vietnam and Thailand. Their economy is primarily agricultural; there isn't a significant manufacturing sector.

Interestingly, neighboring Thailand is a major exporter of (largely ICE) automobiles.

Laos was never going to be able to set up a car factory, so imported cars - mostly Chinese - are already the default. If you have to import cars, getting them from your neighbour, who happens to be the world expert on cheap electric cars, isn't a terrible thing.

Laos

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