Busting Electric Car Myths In Costa Rica & Globally (CleanTechnica Video)
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In Amsterdam earlier this year for EVBox’s first annual rEVolution conference, one of the presenters was TED Talker, Latin American EV super advocate, and CleanTechnica reader Monica Araya. She gave a wonderful presentation on breaking down electric vehicle myths in Costa Rica, more broadly across Latin America, and even more broadly across the world. The presentation is definitely worth a watch, so have at it! (And here’s a PDF of the slides.)
A few major points worth remembering:
- There are far more charging points than gas stations, and many of them are inside people’s garages.
- Conventional hybrids are not the same as plug-in cars and generally lack the power and smooth driving experience of plug-in cars, not to mention the convenience of home charging.
- There aren’t nearly as many fast charging stations needed as some people claim, primarily because EV drivers don’t use charging stations like gas/diesel car drivers do — ~80% of charging is done at work or home.
- The best way to explain the benefits of electric cars is to just get them into electric cars and show them how they charge.
- The key is people — people who convince people who convince people.
I was quite happy to see Monica’s presentation before mine in Amsterdam, because they were highly complementary and she covered several of the points I wanted to cover. Check out my presentation and summary here if you missed it:
Monica’s husband, Bjorn Utgard, is now working for EVBox and will actually be one of the 
presenters at our coming West Meets East: Charging Central & Eastern Europe’s Electromobility Revolution conference in Warsaw, November 6–8.
Co-organized with GreenWay, we have a lineup of awesome EV charging leaders coming from the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Slovakia, Ukraine, Hungary, Finland, Switzerland, Germany, Sweden, the UK, and the USA to advance EV charging and EV adoption.
Additionally, we will be launching an EV charging guidelines white paper at the conference. Co-produced with EV experts at GreenWay and Ernst & Young (EY), it is based on the thorough input of a diverse working group of EV charging movers & shakers from EVBox, Fortum, ChargePoint, PlugSurfing, EasyCharge.me, innogy, To-U, Tesla Shuttle, Urban Foresight, ELMO, CC Law, the Amsterdam city government, and Norsk elbilforening (the Norway EV Association). Thanks to all of these EV charging leaders for providing their input!
I hope to see you at the conference too.
If you just want to explore more EV myths, see: 10 Myths & Criticisms Of Electric Cars Explored & Exploded.
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