While en­cour­aged by the in­creased de­mand for elec­tric ve­hi­cles (EVs) in Trinidad and To­ba­go, brand man­ag­er and team leader for BYD T&T, Ker­ri-Ann Seer­at­tan, is warn­ing the pub­lic against pur­chas­ing EVs from unau­tho­rised deal­ers.

Seer­at­tan made the plea at the launch of the BYD Dol­phin Mi­ni at Bri­an Lara’s res­i­dence ear­li­er this month, as in re­cent weeks sev­er­al car deal­ers have not­ed a num­ber of car im­porters have emerged with re­duced over­head costs via lim­it­ed man­pow­er op­er­a­tions.

Car deal­ers have stat­ed that this of­ten leaves both con­sumers and au­tho­rised deal­ers be­ing tasked with re­pair­ing ve­hi­cles which are not tried and test­ed for the lo­cal cli­mate.

“I made spe­cial em­pha­sis on the fact that LaFace Mo­tors is the au­tho­rised deal­er for BYD, be­cause we have the sup­port that all buy­ers of BYD would need.

“We have the ser­vice cen­tre, we’re the ac­tu­al im­porters of the ve­hi­cle au­tho­rised from BYD. So it’s re­al­ly about the sup­port. It’s part of an ecosys­tem you’re buy­ing in­to,” said Seer­at­tan in an in­ter­view with Guardian Me­dia.

Over­all, Seer­at­tan was pleased that the coun­try had start­ed grav­i­tat­ing to EVs and hy­brids in re­cent years.

“I be­lieve the BYD team has been quite big pi­o­neers of bring­ing EVs on­to the mar­ket. It’s been a chal­lenge and joy, in some ways, to ed­u­cate peo­ple on why go elec­tric. Why go hy­brid? There are so many ad­van­tages,” said Seer­at­tan.

Ser­rat­tan al­so con­firmed that the roll­out of the Dol­phin Mi­ni was part of BYD’s grow­ing ex­pan­sion, and its price point at un­der $200,000 was al­so aimed to­wards mem­bers of the pub­lic look­ing for an af­ford­able EV op­tion. —Pe­ter Christo­pher