hckrnws
Country went 100% electric vehicles overnight with a drastic approach
(electrek.co)
15
14
by sudenmorsian
by sudenmorsian
> 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.
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Elektrek links to Eco-Business, a similar blog republishing press releases. They cite, but do not link to, the press release on the Lao Ministry of Industry and Commerce web site.
That is actually news, or close to it. The rest of the process might as well be done by an LLM, with or without a human edit, and then discarded.
[I asked google for those prices, so my estimates above are only as good as what Gemini gave me]
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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.
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.
Interestingly, neighboring Thailand is a major exporter of (largely ICE) automobiles.
> Laos isn’t doing this for climate headlines. The logic is economic.
> The headline writes itself. A country went nearly 100% EV overnight. But the mechanism matters..
I mean, come on... if it quacks like a duck and it em-dashes like a duck...