The car charges it from his office, because the administration as a whole put him in trouble because they didn’t know how to charge the energy to his apartment. And it is there, in the lack of infrastructure to accommodate the electric ones, where Borda sees one of the main problems for its penetration.
“No building in Bogotá or the country is designed to support additional electrical loads beyond what each apartment contributes in its daily consumption. Under current conditions, if all homeowners bought electric and plugged in at peak times, the system would be overloaded and power would go out. The electrical network is a great river that has a flow. As companies and industries start to require more energy, they’re going to start sucking from that great river and it’s going to start to vacate,” he says.
From the brief tour we did, Borda is overwhelmed by the lack of standardization of minimal details, but essential for the operation of these models, such as the unification of the connectors that each vehicle has, because what has happened so far is that each importer Bring your equipment with different connectors, in the style of cell phones:
“As each importer has been bringing their own equipment without regulation, this causes a total disruption of the energy supply. There should be legislation that imposes a maximum of two types of connectors. This is the case in countries like the Netherlands, where they have two types of connectors by law”, says Borda.
As enthusiasm for electric cars takes off, the other big challenge comes with motorcycles, which are the dominant vehicle fleet in Colombia with 75 percent of total registrations in 2022.
For experts like Tomás González, a public policy is needed that aims at the electrification of motorcycles, but that is not happening: “if we do not electrify motorcycles, we will not get very far in our aspirations to stop registering vehicles by 2040 “, says.
Although in motorcycles there is already price parity between electric and combustion models, more electric motorcycles are not necessarily being sold, which today are only about 12 thousand out of 11 million motorcycles in total, according to data from Andemos given for this note.
“This shows that the problem is not only one of prices, but of the infrastructure of this type of transport. There are already seven and a half million pesos electric motorcycles that compete on price, but are not attractive to users due to the lack of power to move through mountain areas or because there are not enough charging points in the cities,” says Olivero. Garcia.
I spoke with Felipe Botero, a thirty-year-old from Bogota for whom the electric motorcycle has indeed been a profitable option. He bought a 12 million Wolf Husky that he used five times a week to go from the Bosque Izquierdo neighborhood, next to Macarena, to Kennedy, where he worked as a teacher.
“I used up 60 percent of the battery on that trip, so I had to charge it every night. The battery is removable, so I can plug it into many outlets. Normally the bike runs very well, with a top speed of 80 kms. It has never hung up on any climb or left me stranded,” he says.
Botero calculates that since he started using the motorcycle, his electricity bill has increased by 30,000 pesos a month, much less than what he would spend tanking with gasoline. “My reasons for buying it were of an environmental nature, and I am happy to walk without polluting. In addition, one saves good money ”, he says. Even so, he admits that he has the limitation that he cannot move it outside the city, since he does not find it very off-road nor does he believe that there are enough points to charge it.
Just outside the cities is where the other challenge of sustainable mobility lies, in the transport of cargo that moves between departments and from ports.
The last mile for electric trucks
If the challenge in the cities is that there is not enough infrastructure for electric cars to be connected, from cargo transportation the challenges are even bigger because the main roads of the country lack charging stations, which are the stations for charging vehicles. with electricity, and that would allow an electric truck to charge its batteries while traveling distances of more than 200 kilometers by road.
Today there are very few charging points on national roads, around 119 stations for all roads. Companies like Terpel have the project of installing 50 additional electric stations, with the idea that they charge 1,450 pesos per kilowatt/hour for charging, but they are disjointed efforts and investments that are estimated between 80 and 100 million pesos per charger for each electric station. .
“There should be a law that establishes a minimum number of chargers on the country’s main roads for every 200 kilometers, which is the autonomy that a cargo truck can achieve today. But that implies rethinking how these spaces that are now service stations are conceived as new places where many cars will come to charge their vehicles and in longer charging times”, says Oliverio García.
For Darío Hidalgo, the challenge is not only in the availability of the load, but in the incentives of the truckers: “charging a large battery, like the one a truck would need, is removing useful load from the trucks so that they carry their own battery or electricity. Since there is control at the scale, truckers would have to subtract it from the billable load. That is inefficient,” he says.
For this reason, he believes that freight transport will be the last sector to be electrified, and that an intermediate transition to natural gas will have to take place before talking about one that can function efficiently in another way, such as with hydrogen. A point with which Juan Luis Mesa, from the BYD company, agrees.
“Competing in the long distance segment is quite unlikely because the solutions are not available. What currently exists is the possibility of carrying cargo in intermediate sections, that is, distances under 250 kilometers, such as Barranquilla to Cartagena, Bucaramanga to Girón or Bogotá and the municipalities of the savannah, ”he says.
But another is the image in shorter distances, where there is already a whole market created. This is what Andrés Cortés Parra believes, one of those who has his sights on the electric truck market. Forty-two years old, Parra is the national electric mobility manager for Auteco, a Colombian company that began selling motorcycles and today seeks to expand into the sale of electric vehicles in countries like Ecuador and Mexico.
Andrés’ business consists of advising large companies such as Bavaria or Alpina to help them electrify their vehicle fleets. Today they lead the market for electric trucks and vans in the country with more than 80 percent of sales.
In the truck sector, they divide the types of electric vehicles into two. There are the first-mile ones, which are in charge of moving large volumes of merchandise from ports to distribution centers and factories, and there are the last-mile ones, which handle the detailed distribution of merchandise within cities. Auteco has focused on this last segment with models created with its own engineers.
Cortés says confident that the technology already exists to cover 100 percent of the last mile distribution in the country, which consists of trucks that can carry up to 27 tons of weight. This year they plan to sell 2,000 electric vehicles, of which 90 percent will be for the transport of goods.
Costs vary by model, but the cheapest cargo van they sell gets 150 miles of range and a ton of cargo capacity. It is at 102 million pesos.
During the first half of the year, Great Wall Motors, the manufacturer of the specialist brands in trucks and SUVs -Great Wall and Haval- closed an excellent first half, after positioning both among the leaders of their respective segments.
Additionally, Great Wall positioned three of its models among the 20 most commercialized trucks in the country, highlighting Poer in fifth place with 2,161 units sold to date. Model that since its introduction in 2020 has become a benchmark in its segment and one of the favorites of Chilean consumers, also receiving very good reviews from the specialized press, who chose it as Best Truck at the Los Mejores awards. 2021, being the first of its origin to receive this award.
