Texto para a pergunta.
DRIVING IN MONGOLIA
The soft hum of the Toyota Prius is to the streets of Ulaanbaatar what the screech [chiado, guincho] of brakes and honk of horns is to New York: omnipresent. Beloved of eco-warriors worldwide, the Japanese car dominates the streets of Mongolia’s capital. If you stand on the corner of Sukhbaatar Square ∈ the city center, a good half of the passenger vehicles you see sailing past are Priuses. Dozens of garages [oficinas] work only with them. According to UN trade data and The Economist’s estimates, some 60% of Mongolia’s car imports last year [2017] were hybrids.
They are popular ∈Mongolia, as elsewhere, because hybrid engines are efficient and fuel costs low. The cars themselves are also cheap: according to the UB Post, a local newspaper, you can purchase a used Prius for as little as $2,000. That is partly because most Mongolian ones are second-hand imports from Japan, where passenger vehicles more than three years old must undergo expensive safety tests. Rather than pay for those, many Japanese drivers buy a new car. (That is the point of the tests, some say: to boost [apoiar, fortelecer] domestic car manufacturers.) In 2017, Japan exported 30,000 hybrid vehicles to Mongolia.
In addition, the government has exempted hybrids from various taxes, ∈ an attempt to clear the air ∈Ulaanbaatar. The city is one of the most polluted ∈ the world ∈ winter because of the widespread [generalizado] use of coal for heating and power generation. Hybrid vehicles enter the country duty-free and, unlike most cars, are exempt from an air-pollution tax.
But the clincher [fator decisivo] is the Prius’s reliability. Ulaanbaatar may be the chilliest capital ∈ the world. On a winter morning drivers must sometimes start their cars ∈ temperatures below –30 degrees Celsius. Cars that run on gasoline and diesel tend to sputter [falhar] and die at such temperatures. The Prius can use its battery to power its electrical engine until the car warms up enough for the gasoline engine to run smoothly – saving many a Mongolian from freezing frustration.
Adapted from The Economist, December 22, 2018.
According to the information ∈ the article,
