by Rod Hughes

As the continued rise in petroleum prices threatens to imbalance Costa Rica’s foreign exchange, the government would like nothing better than for Ticos to think more about dumping their SUVs in favor of a hybrid car. Purdy Motors is all for that.

Purdy, a longtime fixture in the national motoring scene, is the only Costa Rican importer who had the foresight to bring in hybrid cars, notes an exclusive business story in the weekly The Tico Times. So you can have any kind of hybrid here as long as it is a Toyota Prius. From Purdy Motors.

Although Purdy has been importing the Prius since 2004, only about a hundred hybrids cruise the country so far, according to the importer’s marketing manager, Luis Mastroeni. One of the measures the Ministry of Energy and Environment has urged to cut imports of expensive petroleum are hybrids and electric cars. Mastroeni claims that Purdy is the only dealer in all of Latin America to see the handwriting on the wall and pay attention to hybrids.

Environment Minister Roberto Dobles would like further tax breaks on hybrids. Even now, the Prius buyer pays only a 34% Selective Consumption Tax as opposed to 52% for other vehicles. Still, Tico Times reporter Leslie Friday questioned whether many Ticos would pick up the Prius’s rather hefty price tag of $36,700.

Although the paper says that Dobles is interested in electric cars and thinks the nation’s electric grid can handle the extra load, no importer has yet to jump at the opportunity.

In other pretroleum crisis news, 60 heavy cargo trucks held a slowdown on the roads between Alajuela and Paseo Colon in San Jose to protest rising fuel prices, causing traffic jams that effected the entire metropolitan area. What the drivers of these semi-truck-trailers hoped to gain by blocking traffic, other than to inconvenience their fellow citizens, is hard to imagine. Certainly the government has no hold over OPEC and is, indeed, as concrned about the situation as anyone else.