Our brief flirtation with electric cars

During our frequent trips to Queretaro we’ve noticed an increased number of Chinese car dealerships, many offering electric models. Forget the familiar Chevy, Ford and Toyota names and tune your ear to exotic brands that sound like a dim sum buffet: Geely, Jac, BYD, Omoda, Danfeng, Saic, Baoyun and GWM (“Great Wall Motors”), and which are also showing up on the roads and parking lots of the city, though I haven’t spotted any in San Miguel.

Just in the past two years, Chinese cars have crashed into the Mexican auto market full-speed. Last year alone sales of Chinese cars in Mexico went up 63 percent, largely driven by their low price, sometimes $6,000 to $10,000 cheaper than comparable Japanese, European or American models but also their distinct style and apparently first-class craftsmanship. However, European countries, the U.S., and under American pressure, also Mexico, have responded with protective tariffs because many of the Chinese car makers are owned and subsidized by the government, which puts domestic private car manufacturers elsewhere at a disadvantage.

The buzz about electric cars caught up with Stew and I when we noticed a BYD (“Build Your Dream”) dealership right next to the Audi agency in Queretaro where our Q5 was being serviced. Chinese-anything is a tough sell to Stew who late in life has developed an acute case of sinophobia and says he doesn’t want to buy anything Chinese-made. Such one-man boycotts, I have explained, amount to a hiding under a rock when soon enough even rocks will come from China.

Curiosity overcame his prejudices, though, and we walked over to the BYD dealer where we were greeted by a curvy young woman who took our email address, offered some water and passed us on to an eager salesman. The sales floor, behind floor-to-ceiling glass windows, gleamed under an array of electric spotlights that highlighted the shiny vehicles, most of them electric but one a hybrid plug-in, which is a combination electric and a small conventional engine. Outside the showroom there were two electric vehicle charging stations that resembled the familiar pumps at a gas station.

Our preconceived notions, fed by memories of junky Japanese and Korean cars that once appeared in the U.S., were that Chinese cars would be equally unappetizing. Instead the BYDs we saw and sat in seemed absolutely first-class in every respect, even with the new-car aroma, and not at all cheap knock-offs of American or Japanese cousins. Their interior design had a distinctive retro look that may strike some buyers as a bit weird. It shouldn’t surprise that Chinese car manufactures can produce high-quality cars because for years they have been making American- and European-branded cars.

In fact, globalization has turned the car market into a jambalaya of components made in different parts to the world. Our Audi Q5 is assembled in Puebla, next to a mammoth Volkswagen plant that has operated for years, with most components made in Germany but some in Hungary. Cars and pickups sold in Mexico can have engines or transmissions made in Brazil or Argentina, or perhaps Thailand, regardless of their putative brand of origin.

After checking out the BYD electrics, a huge billboard lured us to visit the Volvo dealership nearby where electric vehicles of varying sizes and design dominated the showroom. Stew’s sinophobia went off again like a gong when we discovered that the Volvo EX-30, the smallest and best-selling model, damn, is made in China. On our second visit to the Volvo dealer there were dozens of EX-30s on the parking lot and more being offloaded from a truck.

So we checked out the larger models, made in Belgium and Sweden. Volvos’ tank-like feel and obsession with safety live on: The salesman took us out for a ride in a medium-size model and demonstrated a range of startling safety features—video monitors on all four sides of the car, automatic sensors that slowed the car if it was too close to the one ahead and a corrective mechanism that detected the stripes on the pavement and nudged the car back into the lane if it was drifting off, presumably because of driver fatigue or exhaustion.

But the car we drove also has two adrenaline-pumping electric motors that propelled it at rocket speed in seconds. If during his famous televised chase in 1994 O.J. Simpson had been driving one of these Volvos instead of his pokey white Ford Bronco, he would have gotten to Vancouver before the Los Angeles cops reached Oregon.

Problem is that the batteries in the Volvo, or any electric vehicle marketed today, wouldn’t have taken O.J. that far. The Volvo we tested claimed a 300-mile range but that is a nominal estimate under certain driving conditions, certainly not a high-speed chase. Besides, recharging the batteries can take up to six or eight hours, unless you find a turbo charger, still rare in Mexico, that would put you back on the road in a half-hour with an eighty percent battery charge.

Undeterred, we figured even that limited range would work fine for us, if we installed a home charger that would slowly “fill up” the Volvo overnight. Our newly updated solar electric plant could handle the job and we would effectively operate the Volvo for nothing, if we used it for our usual runs to town or nearby Querétaro. Besides, maintenance on a electric vehicle is comparatively negligible because it doesn’t have pistons, valves and other moving parts that come with an internal combustion engine.

But those savings come at a relatively stiff sticker price for the Volvo we tested which was, gulp, $75,000 dollars, though the Mexican government offers a discount on the annual plate-renewal fees, and also waives the air pollution inspections.

But what if we wanted to drive to Monterrey, or even the U.S.? We could make pit-stops to recharge the car, but that assumes the availability of turbo chargers. Google maps now indicate the location of charging stations, but in places like Saltillo, Matehuala or San Luis Potosi we found only a few. In San Miguel there is a new turbo charger by the Soriana grocery store, and elsewhere in the Luciérnaga shopping center and the Live Aqua Hotel, but the last two are Tesla chargers whose connectors are incompatible with those in other brands.

Soon, the thrills of a zippy electric vehicle deflated by a new phenomenon in mental health: “recharge anxiety.”

No doubt that in a few years electric chargers will become as common as gas pumps did when internal combustion vehicles were introduced, and I can imagine chargers showing up at conventional gas stations and highway rest stops. In Amsterdam, for instance, several years ago we saw electric vehicle chargers alongside parking meters, and in Paris many city buses were électrique.

But in Mexico, where it took several years before hybrid Toyota Priuses appeared after they were common in the U.S., it will take even longer to develop a wide and reliable network of chargers.

So for now, that hissing you hear is the sound of the air going out of the tires of Stew and Al’s electric car dreams.