I remember the tail end of the Age of Donkeys. Up until maybe 2007 (my memory is vague about what year) an old East Indian gentleman sold bananas from a donkey cart just before the Preysal highway flyover. His name was Sookhai Ramkhilawan.
One day Sookhai's donkey was replaced by a pickup truck, but that didn't last long. He said that gas was too expensive and the donkey's grass was free! Soon Sookhai and his donkey cart was a fixture in Preysal again.
I would often hear the story of how my mother pushed him and the donkey cart into a drain with her first car, a Volkswagen Beetle. This happened in the late 1960s in a nearby sugarcane field. Nobody was hurt, but my mother felt awful about it and offered him a $20 bill, which was all the money she had. She was embarrassed because even then $20 wasn't much. He beamed a smile at her; for $20 she could push him off the road any day!
Such a different Trinidad: sugar cane, donkey carts and Volkswagen Beetles. Of course this was also a time of social inequality, racial tensions, a surge towards enshrining newly won independence. It is not that long ago, before my time, but within my mother's lifeline.
Except for my mother, who is still alive and kicking and occasionally driving, everything in this history has changed. I do not know if Sookhai is still with us, I haven't seen him for years. He was always old in my memory; donkey carts have disappeared from Trinidad's streets; the sugarcane fields that brought so many here are nearly all gone. Twenty million Volkswagen Beetles were built, but you would hard-pressed to see one driving today.
Globally there are 1.2 billion cars on the road today. Gas and diesel combustion engines power most of these.
Driving a fossil fuel-powered vehicle in 2016 is much like riding a donkey cart, or horse or mule, in 1916. It is a technology that is still dominant but on the way out. Sookhai and his donkey cart were quaint exceptions to the rule.
Look at how fast the automotive world is changing. Germany, where the Volkswagen Beetle sprang from Adolf Hitler's mind in the 1930s, wants to ban the sale of petrol and diesel powered cars by 2030. Only electric and hydrogen powered vehicles will be allowed to leave the showroom. That timeline is less than half as long as when my mother hit the donkey cart in Preysal. The Netherlands and Norway want action sooner; they aim to reduce gas and diesel powered car sales by 2025.
Electric cars have policy makers pushing their market but within five years they will be better and cheaper than gasoline cars. That is a bold statement but take this in to consideration: the fastest production car in the world is an electric car. It is the Tesla P100D Ludicrous mode vehicle. It accelerates from 0-60 Mph in 2.5 seconds and has a range of 315 miles. It is still pricey, too expensive to break the mass market, at US$134,500 in the United States.
The real market openers will be cars like the Chevy Bolt, an electric car that is not as fancy as the Tesla but with costs about 1/4th the price and has a range of 238 miles, and the Tesla Model 3 which sells at about US$35,000 and has a range of 215 miles. These are game changer cars. They can easily enough drive from Port-of-Spain to Icacos, stop off at the beach, have a coconut and gaze at the South American coastline and drive back to Port-of-Spain. Most Trinidadians have never driven to Cedros more than twice in their lives.
Duty-free and Vat free the Chevy Bolt will cost about TT$250,000. To put this in to context: The fuel subsidy since 2005 amounts to roughly TT$27 billion. That same amount today could have purchased 108,000 new Chevy Bolts–something to consider.
Electric vehicles will pose a problem for T&T. After successive governments wasted tax payer money financing a fuel subsidy for which the country has nothing to show, the T&T government will face similar subsidies for vehicles unless it does something about electricity rates. Ten years is only two terms of government in T&T, and we need a minimum of three terms to change any law. We have one of the lowest electricity tariffs in the world, with the maximum residential rate being TT$0.37 per kWh.
The logical way around this is to embrace solar power. T&T's greatest natural resource has always been the sun. The oil and gas we sell our climate changing souls for is no more than converted solar energy. The world's cheapest solar energy is now being produced at less than US$0.06. This happens to be the same amount as T&TEC sells, loss making, subsidised electricity for. This cost will reduce even further.
Sookhai Ramkhilawan, the donkey cart man, I can still hear him say: "Gas too expensive, grass is free!"