The T&T Au­to­mo­tive Deal­ers As­so­ci­a­tion (TTA­DA) has called on the Gov­ern­ment to stop wast­ing mon­ey be­hind CNG.

The TTA­DA held a news con­fer­ence yes­ter­day at the P&V Mar­ket­ing Com­pa­ny Head­quar­ters at Mulchan Sieuc­hand Road, Ch­agua­nas.

TTA­DA Head Visham Bab­wah said it comes as no sur­prise to TTA­DA that the Pe­tro­le­um Deal­ers As­so­ci­a­tion have threat­ened to stop the sale of CNG be­cause it is prov­ing to be un­prof­itable.

Bab­wah said for the last 40 years CNG has failed to at­tract more than 10,000 cus­tomers while hy­brid and elec­tric ve­hi­cles have sur­passed 50,000 units in the past three years.

Bab­wah said gov­ern­ment has coughed up $2 Bil­lion be­hind CNG in­fra­struc­ture and the coun­try has open­ly re­ject­ed it.

He said “I am call­ing on the au­thor­i­ties to give a re­fund to per­sons who have brought CNG kits and in­stead pump monies in­to de­vel­op­ing an elec­tric car net­work with charg­ing sta­tions across T&T.

In 20 years there will be a few man­u­fac­tur­ers mak­ing com­bus­tion en­gines.

Cur­rent­ly com­pa­nies like Vol­vo have in­di­cat­ed that they will be go­ing ful­ly elec­tric in 5 years time. What we need is an elec­tric car charg­ing net­work.”

Bab­wah said his as­so­ci­a­tion mem­bers have been get­ting call from con­sumers who are ex­treme­ly wor­ried about the sta­tus of the avail­abil­i­ty of CNG in the near fu­ture.

Bab­wah said “We have been telling the gov­ern­ment that CNG is ob­so­lete tech­nol­o­gy that is still re­ceiv­ing sub­sidy from the state. CNG on­ly ben­e­fits a few who stand to col­lect $ mil­lions while the small man is con­stant­ly be­ing mis­led.”