With great fanfare, the Mercedes Benz company unveiled these days the manufacture of a car that has a range of 1,000 km electrically with a single recharge. This is a milestone, because most electric cars -until now- had half, or even less autonomy and needed to be recharged on the road.
With this car, one could practically make the Asunción-Buenos Aires crossing without having to load and refuel on the way.
For you to realize, that means that more or less 100 kilometers costs G. 4,000. A trip to Asunción-CDE would cost approximately G. 14,000, round trip G. 28,000, rounded up to G.30,000, a figure that is still much less than the cost of the toll, which is G.50,000 one way and G.50,000 return, and what one could acquire in the form of sparks on the way.
Electric power is taking a huge step in the car manufacturing system and each time it demonstrates its validity and absolute permanence in the face of a future where it will be less and less attractive to drive and buy hydrocarbon-powered vehicles, something that is now becoming more and more more expensive and responsible for the highly inflationary economic situation in the world.
We are on our way to independence, and to the privilege of Paraguayans who have the largest hydropower per-capita in the world, it is a great opportunity to shout a second independence in this month of May from petroleum derivatives and make our entire automotive park move to electricity and setting a date for that purpose; it could be an expensive one or perhaps less, which will also mean thinking about some sectors that could be affected, such as the case of mechanics, since a large part of the electric car repair process occupies very little labor, not as much as the current.
Several changes are coming and Paraguay -in the month of May, the month of its independence- should be thinking seriously that the second of them has to be about hydrocarbons. Our cry for May has to be the triumph of hydropower in all fields.
