Driving an electric vehicle on a road trip can be difficult 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 requiring electric utilities to install fast chargers every 50 miles on national highways. That and the tax breaks have made Costa Rica a pioneer in electric vehicles. Today, nearly one in five new cars sold in the country is electric, a phenomenon that I came to talk about.
Utilities typically installed a single charger at each location. Chargers often don’t work, according to reviews of apps like PlugShare.
Costa Rica is one of the most prosperous and stable countries in Latin America, but in rural areas many roads are not yet paved. Some areas, including the one I visited, only received electricity in the 1980s.
I rented a BYD Yuan, sold as SF1 in Costa Rica, from Green Circle Experience, a company that runs tours of hotels and resorts that follow sustainable practices.
The SF1, a small but capable sport utility vehicle that sells for around $30,000, is popular in Costa Rica. Costa Ricans buy electric vehicles three times more than Americans, in part because of the availability of cheap Chinese models, which the United States bans with huge tariffs.
Green Circle designs itineraries that include hotels with chargers. My three-day rental and two-night stay cost just over $700.
The people at Green Circle encouraged me to visit a small hotel on the Pacific coast called Hacienda Barú, about 200 kilometers from San José, the capital. They thought I should meet the founder of the hotel, who is also Jack Ewing. (No connection, to my knowledge.)
When I picked up the car in San Jose, the dashboard estimated that it could go 400 kilometers, or about 250 miles, before running out of juice.
San Jose is 3,800 feet above sea level, so the first part of the ride was steeply downhill. The car barely used any energy.
It was a hot day and I was driving with the windows open because I didn’t know how to turn on the air conditioning. Like the dashboards of many Chinese cars in Costa Rica, the buttons and video display featured Chinese characters. That’s because it was imported into Costa Rica from a Chinese dealership, making it what the industry calls a gray market import. If this were a regular import – sold by BYD to a Costa Rican dealer – the manufacturer would have ensured that the controls were in Spanish. (Finally I figured it out.)
I arrived at the coast after about two hours with a charge of more than 80 percent. Then the road flattened out, passing beach towns and miles of palm oil plantations.
Traffic was slow on mostly two-lane roads where the speed limit is 50 miles per hour and traffic was often reversed.
The car battery was 50% charged when I arrived at Hacienda Barú, a collection of bungalows surrounded by rainforest. This meant I would need to recharge my batteries to return, uphill, to San José.
The Hacienda Barú has a charger that can recharge the battery in four or five hours, but I can’t get it to work. Eric Orlich, director of 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 a charging cord through a window and into a standard electrical outlet. By morning, the battery was more than 80 percent full. Then a hotel employee ran the charger so I could fill it all the way up.
I chatted with the other Jack Ewing, who is retired but had come to visit us. Stopping after a game of dominoes, he told me how he moved from Colorado to Costa Rica in the 1970s to manage a cattle ranch.
“I fell in love with the rainforest,” he said.
Gradually, Mr. Ewing allowed nature to reclaim the pastures, transforming the ranch into a vacation spot where guests can spot coatis, monkeys, peccaries, sloths and the occasional mountain lion. Without really meaning to, he helped invent ecotourism, today a major industry.
Mr. Ewing doesn’t have much to say about electric vehicles, but one reason Costa Rica’s government supports these cars is to boost the country’s appeal to environmentally conscious tourists.
On the way back, I met Aramis Pérez, an engineering professor at the University of Costa Rica and one of the country’s leading experts on electric vehicles.
He had plugged his battery-powered Toyota into the only fast charger in Dominical, a nearby village popular with surfers. The car was consuming juice, he said, but he couldn’t say 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 secure a contract to assess the state of the country’s charging system. “Right now we’re doing it for free,” he said.
I followed Mr. Pérez as he conducted inspections, noting defects and opportunities for improvement. In the city of Quepos, for example, the charger was in a hospital parking lot. There was no place to eat or get coffee, Mr. Pérez noted, but it was safe.
The charger was designed to service two vehicles, but the parking space was large enough for one. The charger display screen 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 companies other than utilities to sell electricity. Utilities supported the law even though it ends their pricing monopoly. Marco Acuña, general director of Grupo ICE, the country’s largest utility, said it doesn’t matter whether it sells electricity to consumers or charging station operators.
“We can sell the hamburger or we can sell the cow,” he told me.
I got back to San Jose without needing a fast charger. This is the main reason why it is possible, although not always easy, to drive electric in Costa Rica. I charged at night, while I was sleeping. In a small country, that’s usually all you need.
