If it were necessary to state the challenges that lie ahead for electric cars to be able to impose itself as the future of mobility over conventional vehicles with internal combustion engines, those would be, without a doubt, autonomy, charging infrastructure and price. Then there are many other things to improve or develop, but those three are the essential ones.
When an Argentine terminal decides import electric cars from its parent company or the factory where it is produced in another part of the world, has to deal with those three intrinsic conditions for any motorist in the world, plus face an enormous tangle of taxes and tariffs that double the value with which it is purchased. He boarded the ship to reach this part of the world. But that is another issue, which conditions the development of electric mobility in Argentinawhich maintains it as a niche segment, and which can only be solved with an electromobility Law and a profound tax reform.
It happened to renault with the Kangoo ZE in 2018, it happened to nissan with the Leaf in 2019, a Audi with the e-tron between 2020 and 2022, to ford with the Mustang Mach-E in 2023 and now to Renault again with the Kwid E-Teh and the Mégane E-Tech. They are wonderful cars, which have completely innovative and revolutionary technology, but they have to be developed in cities that are not prepared for this form of propulsion.
A couple of years ago, the then global CEO of DS, Beatrice Foucher, said during his time in Buenos Aires that “when we started working with electric cars in 2012 in Europe, the countries were not prepared. There were no car outlets, except in homes. However, we saw that All houses have electricity but do not have a fuel pump. So, it is easy to charge an electric car. The issue of countries and their infrastructure is like the story of the chicken and the egg. What do you have to have first, the cars to build the network or the network to bring the cars?”
With this idea floating around in the heads of the executives of all the automobile brands that decided to bring electric cars to Argentina, they are attacking one of the problems of this technology, that of infrastructure. Discarding the price, because it is clear that these cars will be bought by people with significant purchasing power, at least for the moment, it is time to test autonomy.
Ford Argentina had the idea of using a very special event such as the 24 hours from Buenos Aires to test the Mustang Mach-E that arrived at the end of the year in our market. This race, which was famous in the 70s as an event in the Argentine championship of the Tourism Annex J category, has been a regularity competition with controlled speed, in which all types of vehicles participate, which begins on Saturday at noon and ends on Sunday at the same time. Little by little it became a classic again, although now not as a sports competition but as entertainment with cars.
But there was another motivation to go with a “Mustang troupe” to the capital’s racetrack, and that was to take advantage of the coincidence of dates to start the celebrations in Argentina of the 60 years of the Mustang, which began two weeks ago in Sao Paulo, Brazil, and had replicas around the world. For this purpose, the Mustang Club to participate in an event prior to the competition, with a parade of models of all time, and the assembly in the confectionery curve area, of a number 60 with the cars themselves on the grass.
Returning to the main event, for this “fire test” of the Mach-E, two exactly the same units, even of the same color, which would have three pilots each. One with Kalil Zschocke and Axel Margossian from the Mustang Club of Argentina, and another with journalists Guillermina Fossati, Orlando Cristófalo and Carlos Cristófalo. In addition, taking advantage of the fact that the 60 years of the Ford Mustang are being celebrated around the world, they also put a Mustang Mach-1 V8which was crewed by Oreste Berta (h), Gustavo Der Ohanessian and Marcelo Balestrini.
Due to the format of the race, all the cars that register to participate are divided by categories and at the same time by groups, so that they are not all on the track simultaneously 24 hours a day, but rather during two continuous hours with a break of another two hours at the end of each turn.
This is how the crews of the electric Mustangs, although they competed in the same division, were at different times on the circuit, which allowed them not to overlap to recharge the battery in the charger. YPF which was outside the circuit, at a service station on General Roca Avenue, which had to be resorted to at every opportunity.
The experience was better than expected. In each turn on the track, the average speed during 120 continuous minutes of walking was 80 km/h. This involved a 150 km trip in which 44% of the battery was consumed that always started at 100%. The fact that it has never dropped below 50% after each turn implies that the car could have completed two full turns without recharging and left a rest to cover the 2,000 meters that connected the pits of the racetrack. Oscar and Juan Gálvez from Buenos Aires with external charging station. The charger had two connectors, one CCS2 and a Chademo, with 50kw and 60kw respectively. The Mustangs used the first of them and it took an hour to complete that 44% until returning to a “full tank”.
Taking into account that electric cars are designed for urban use, and that the average speed is not more than 40 km/h under that condition, the measurement of achieving approximately 350 km at double speed, is an excellent reference for users of this technology. Beyond the result, for which what truly impacts is making the appropriate time for each category without overtaking or exceeding too much because both circumstances penalize the crew with time, this edition of the 24 hours of Buenos Aires became the first competition in which electric cars participated in Argentinaand that is already a milestone in itself.
