Jos Cintron, a 43-year-old electrical technician, has developed a solar-powered car, while Augusto Pradelli, 61, has created a micro-electric vehicle (EV) that can also use solar panels. Both cars are built on the chassis of older golf carts with more powerful batteries.
“These electric motors don’t make noise, they don’t vibrate, they don’t pollute, they are the future,” Pradelli said from his workshop in Maracaibo, the capital of the far northeastern state of Zulia. western Venezuela.
“The world must think about how to get out of pollution and global warming”.
Small vehicles can carry four people and travel between 25 and 40 kilometers per hour. The batteries can be recharged with the solar panels in 10 hours or faster using an electric charging station, Pradelli said.
“The beauty of solar charging is that as long as there is sun, the car is always charging,” he said. “The sun is free and that’s what you should enjoy”.
The two men, who self-financed their innovations, hope to work together to develop a hybrid electric car and eventually achieve domestic production, a big dream in a country that was once one of the world’s top oil producers.
“Solar energy is the future, we have to stop depending on fossil fuels,” Cintron said. “But it doesn’t happen overnight and the oil is not going to disappear that easily.”
Both, however, said the environmental benefits were only part of the appeal for residents of the town, known as marabinos. More appealing was how solar-powered cars could help cope with the incessant power cuts and fuel shortages.
Production has plummeted in Venezuela’s state-owned oil industry after years of poor maintenance and lack of investment. Long queues at gas stations are commonplace.
Maracaibo, with 2 million inhabitants, is the second largest city in Venezuela, with tropical temperatures of over 34 degrees Celsius most of the year. Heat makes walking uncomfortable – another selling point for cheap EVs.
The solar panels also provide a solution to the regular power cuts that have hit the region.
Mr Pradelli said Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro even showed his support at a science and technology event in August where his vehicle was on display.
“The president said to me: ‘Augusto, I’ll buy it from you,'” Pradelli said, adding that he had told the president that he would then need the means to produce it.
“‘We would have to manufacture them, Mr. President, and for that, we need an industry, an assembler'”, he recalled.