Simón Huanca, a 53-year-old Indigenous artisan from El Alto, spent more than a year trying to acquire an electric car before importing a Chinese off-road model. He now uses the vehicle to transport his family and alpaca wool for his weaving workshop, charging it from a dedicated station installed in his own garage. “Since last year, I’ve been trying to get an electric car to save on costs,” Huanca said while driving through a working-class neighborhood.
Huanca is part of a small but rapidly expanding cohort of Bolivians making the switch from gasoline-powered vehicles as the South American nation struggles through overlapping energy crises. Bolivia imports roughly 80 percent of its diesel and 55 percent of its gasoline, according to industry figures cited by the Associated Press, and under former President Luis Arce the state maintained a subsidy that bought fuel at international prices and sold it domestically at half its value—an annual drain of more than $2 billion on state coffers.
By late 2025, the country had largely exhausted the foreign currency needed to purchase fuel. Long lines at gas stations had become routine. Then, one month after taking office in November, President Rodrigo Paz repealed the subsidy. Energy prices nearly doubled overnight.
Weeks later, transport operators began complaining that the gasoline itself was damaging engines. Paz alleged sabotage and said fuel distributed by the state-owned oil company Yacimientos Petrolíferos Fiscales Bolivianos, or YPFB, had been contaminated with gum and manganese that lingered in storage tanks since the Arce administration. The “junk gasoline” scandal—along with the Iran war’s threat of further global price spikes—triggered strikes, protests, and the resignations of two senior YPFB officials. For some drivers, it was the final push.
“The investment exceeds $36,000, but I no longer waste valuable working hours searching for fuel or managing vehicle repairs,” said Ever Vera, a 54-year-old lawyer who traded in his gasoline-powered car.
Tax authority data shows the electric-vehicle fleet grew from 500 to 3,352 units in five years, a figure that still represents a tiny fraction of the estimated 2.6 million vehicles in a country of nearly 12 million people. The overwhelming majority of the new EVs were imported from China, followed by the United States.
Freddy Koch, an electromobility expert with the Swiss nonprofit Swisscontact, called the growth “exponential.” He noted that current buyers skew affluent but said broader adoption is likely as competition among importers intensifies—a dynamic accelerated by Paz’s elimination of import tariffs on all types of automobiles.
For 38-year-old electrician Marcelo Laura, the arrival of EVs has already created a new line of business. A month ago, he began specializing in the installation of residential and commercial charging stations, filling a gap in a metro area with only three public chargers. “A year ago,” Laura said, “I thought it was practically impossible to think that people would actually be bringing in electric cars.”