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 in 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 in 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, in an attempt to clear the air in Ulaanbaatar. The city is one of the most polluted in the world in 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 in the world. On a winter morning drivers must sometimes start their cars in 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.
The tax exemptions mentioned at the beginning of paragraph 3 are most likely
