There aren’t that many cars in the small south Asian country of Bhutan, located in the Himalaya mountains. Its only proper urban center is its capital, Thimphu, and even it is not what you’d call big, being home to some 80,000 inhabitants, most of whom are government clerks, officials, members of the country’s royal family and a growing but inconsistent middle class.
The government had previously solely expressed its desire to have some kind of widespread EV adoption scheme put in place, but had not gone any further with the idea, only suggesting that Nissan would somehow be involved; they also planned to halt sales of internal combustion-engined cars too. Now, according to AsiaNews, they have, by directly asking for assistance from the two Japanese manufacturers experienced in the field of electrified cars (Nissan, Mitsubishi).
Their representative was the Bhutanese Prime Minister, Tshering Tobgay, who visited Japan for a few weeks; he said “gasoline is expensive and unfriendly to the environment. Sustainable transportation will bring citizens happiness. We have facilities that can generate renewable, cheaper power using river water.”
Bhutan currently sells most of the clean hydro power that it produces, trading some of the money it makes for gasoline and other fuels it needs to keep things running – EVs would make sense as a large scale solution since there would be no need to import that much fuel.
Once concrete steps are taken towards achieving it and the first results show, this will have a definite positive effect on the GNH of the Bhutanese people. GNH, is the kingdom’s answer to the usual wealth measurement indexes that countries are rated by – it stands for Gross National Happiness and it’s a concept they want to push further for other countries to consider adopting in the future.
For further reference, there’s an Indian TV report on the matter posted below, in video form.
By Andrei Nedelea
Hat tip to Green.Autoblog!
VIDEO