Driving an electric vehicle on a road trip can be challenging enough in the United States. Would that 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 almost one in five new cars sold in the country is electric, a phenomenon I had come to report on.
The utilities typically installed only one charger at each location. Often the chargers 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 in rural areas many roads are still unpaved. Some areas, including the one I visited, didn’t get electricity until the 1980s.
I rented a BYD Yuan, sold as 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 sports car that retails for around $30,000, is popular in Costa Rica. Costa Ricans buy electric vehicles at three times the rate of 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 designs itineraries that include hotels with chargers. My three-day rental and two-night stay cost 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 connection, as far as I know.)
When I got the car in San José, the dashboard estimated it could go 400 kilometers, or about 250 miles, before running out of juice.
San José is 3,800 feet above sea level, so the first part of the drive was steeply downhill. The car used almost no energy.
It was a hot 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 dealer in China — making it what the industry calls a gray market import. If it had been a regular import – sold by BYD to a Costa Rican dealer – the manufacturer would have made sure the check was in Spanish. (Eventually I figured it out.)
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 oil plantations.
It was slow going on mostly two-lane roads where the speed limit is 50 miles per hour and traffic is often backed up.
The car’s battery registered a 50 percent charge when I arrived at Hacienda Barú, a collection of bungalows surrounded by rainforest. This meant I had to charge up to return uphill to San José.
Hacienda Barú has a charger that could refill the battery in four or five hours, but I couldn’t get it to work. Eric Orlich, the director of the Green Circle Experience, solved the problem in a way that illustrates the ingenuity required of electric car owners in Costa Rica.
We inched my BYD close enough to run a charging cord through a window and into a regular outlet. In the morning, the battery was more than 80 percent full. Then a hotel employee got the charger working so I could top up the rest of the way.
I talked to the other Jack Ewing who is retired but had come to visit. Taking a break from a game of dominoes, he told me how he had moved to Costa Rica from Colorado in the 1970s to manage a cattle ranch.
“I fell in love with the rainforest,” he said.
Gradually allowed Mr. Ewing nature to reclaim pastures, and turned the ranch into a resort where guests can catch a glimpse of coatis, monkeys, peccaries, sloths and the occasional cougar. Without really meaning to, he helped invent ecotourism, now a significant industry.
Mr. Ewing didn’t have much to say about electric vehicles, but one of the reasons the Costa Rican government is supporting the cars is to increase the country’s appeal to ecologically minded 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 put his battery-powered Toyota into the only fast charger in Dominical, a nearby village popular with surfers. The car was drawing juice, he said, but he couldn’t tell 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 cars in Costa Rica.
Mr. Pérez has managed projects for the government, including one that helped airport taxi drivers switch to electric vehicles. He hopes to get a contract to assess the state of the country’s collection system. “For now, we’re doing it for free,” he said.
I followed Mr. Pérez as he performed inspections and noted errors 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 serve two vehicles, but the parking lot was big enough for just one. The charger screen was in English. “The good thing is that it works,” said Mr. Perez.
Costa Rica’s charging infrastructure is expected to improve because a new law allows companies other than utilities to sell electricity. The utilities supported the law, even though it removes their charging monopoly. Marco Acuña, CEO of Grupo ICE, the country’s largest utility, said it didn’t matter if he sold power to consumers or to charging station operators.
“We can sell the hamburger or we can sell the cow,” he told me.
I made it back to San José without needing a fast charger. That’s the biggest reason driving electric in Costa Rica is possible, if not always easy. I charged at night while I slept. In a small country, that’s usually all you need.
