A Tale of Two Countries: Bolivia’s EV Sales Are Booming Through A Gasoline Crisis, Whereas Ecuador’s EV Sales Are Also Booming Despite An Electricity Crisis

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Last Updated on: 19th April 2025, 01:16 am

Many, many times have I read the argument against EV adoption in developing countries based upon our (supposed) inability to manage a decent grid, the existence of widespread blackouts, and the resultant energy insecurity. According to this argument, people subject to these blackouts will never change their trustworthy ICEVs for a new, potentially useless technology.

The catch, of course, is that poor countries are as likely to face gasoline scarcity as they are to have blackouts (and probably more so). So, what happens to this “trustworthy” technology when gasoline becomes unavailable? Well, let’s check the latest country to have a gasoline crisis to find out: Bolivia.

Bolivia’s predicament

Bolivia is at a crossroads.

Poor countries tend to subsidize fuel to some extent, sometimes as a measure to provide relief to inflation, sometimes as a consequence of price controls that do not account for local currency devaluation or the fluctuation on prices of oil. Normally, once a subsidy has been established, it’s nearly impossible to lift it, as doing so universally results in massive protests (seen in recent years in Ecuador and Colombia, for example). The fact that the lifting of these policies normally goes hand in hand with generalized cuts to social spending does not help.

But I digress. In 2024, Bolivia spent over 2 billion dollars in gasoline and diesel subsidies, a massive amount for a country with its economy (and almost 5% of its total budget). The country has been having economic trouble for a while, and it basically ran out of money to import fuel a few weeks ago, forcing President Luis Arce to resort to their gold reserves. Yes, that’s not a typo: Arce ordered the selling of part of Bolivia’s gold reserves to buy gasoline and diesel.

Yet fuel remains scarce, and there are warnings of further collapse of ICEV sales, which fell already by 50% in 2024. But there’s a silver lining here: both the government and the people seem to consider EVs as a solution to their conundrum.

Bolivia’s government exempted EVs from all tariffs in 2021, but due to high prices, sales remained few and far between. Already by 2024, more affordable EVs started to buck the trend, though, and that year 129 BEVs were sold, reaching almost 0.5% market share.

But this year so far, growth has been exponential:

Average BEV sales have gone through the roof, with the monthly average growing by a massive 918%: assuming stagnant ICEV sales, this would mean 4% or so market share, but remember, ICEV sales are falling. We sadly don’t know by how much, but it’s very likely that Bolivia has become — in record time — the fourth Latin American market as far as market share goes, and perhaps the third: at this point, an 8–9% market share wouldn’t surprise me. The gist of the matter is that BEV sales in the first two months of 2025 have nearly doubled the total for 2024:

Bolivian media has been receptive to EVs, and there’s a certain affinity with them given Bolivia’s lithium production. The country seems to be betting on ethanol, biofuels, and EVs to solve its crisis, though there are no plans to stop subsidizing fuel, and it’s expected that local production from new wells will provide up to 86% of consumption by late 2026.

Hopefully, the Bolivian people will realize before that how much better it can be to switch to EVs and the country will not need as much fuel in the future as it has calculated.

In Bolivia, we see the dangers of gasoline and diesel dependence for a poor country lacking in foreign reserves, and the rapid pivot towards EVs that can be caused by gasoline scarcity. By this metric, one would assume that blackouts would cause the exact opposite: a slowdown in EV sales. But as we will see in Ecuador, this does not seem to be the case.

Ecuador’s paradox

Through the last fourth months of 2024, Ecuador suffered massive blackouts that started with 6-hour rationing in September and grew to 12 hour rationing in November. The cause? A combination between lack of investment and the worst drought the country had seen in 60 years.

Blackouts ended in December 20, but scarcity is not yet solved and there are alerts that, should rains not come with the expected strength, rationing will start once again. The country is also investing both in traditional thermal generation and in solar panels, though — local media alerts — not at the required speed to avoid issues later in the year.

Yet, despite the very real risk of blackouts, Ecuador’s BEV sales are also booming. Sales grew by a massive 202% in February (reaching an all-time record) and by a more moderate 50% in March:

As a result, market share reached 3.3% in February, even though it slowed down to 1.9% in March:

This comes as a surprise to me. I would’ve expected EV (and particularly BEV) sales to stagnate and perhaps even fall under the mentioned blackouts, not to almost triple. The cause seems to be the same as always: affordable EVs coming from China, particularly the very popular BYD Yuan Pro, which leads the rankings in 2025:

A notable mention to the two Chevrolets (once again showing up in a ranking dominated by China-made cars) and the Audi Q8 E-Tron. It’s also worth mentioning the Neta V, a BEV hatchback in the 11^th position in the ranking, which, priced at $18.990, stands out as one of the most competitive models available anywhere in Latin America. At last, the 60 units you see from Yutong are all electric buses.

As most countries in the region with decent EV adoption, Ecuador has a 0% tariff for BEVs and exempts them from traffic restrictions in the largest cities (which, it bears mentioning, aren’t as strict as other countries’). Even then, it still surprises me to see such rapid growth as we see literal blackouts, something that according to EV naysayers we were not supposed to see. I still believe the blackouts have somewhat affected adoption and we could now be seeing much higher market share in the country had it not been because of them.

But Ecuador stands as an example that, even if it turns out your grid is really not reliable, EVs can still prove themselves a viable alternative.