Update on Agassi's ambitious scheme mentioned here a few months back:
"Electric Cars for All! (No, Really This Time)"
http://www.nytimes.com/indexes/2009/03/19/technology/circuitsemail/index.html?8cir&emc=cir
(text copied below for convenience)
Owning the car but not the battery, and buying zero emission miles
like cell phone minutes... any reason it could not work?
Michel
<< Electric Cars for All! (No, Really This Time)
By DAVID POGUE
Last Sunday, "CBS News Sunday Morning" broadcast my report about
Better Place, a radical, overarching plan to replace the world's gas
cars with electric ones--really, really quickly. The nutty thing is,
it just might work; the streetside charging outlets for these cars are
already under construction in six countries and two U.S. states.
[...]
As always, there wasn't enough time on TV for the whole interview. So
here's a longer, edited excerpt of my chat with Better Place chief
executive Shai Agassi, former SAP executive.
DP: Explain how this is different from all the failed electric car
programs that have come before.
SA: Most of the car efforts were done from within the car, and
assuming that there is no infrastructure change at all. It's as if
people were trying to build cars, but skipping over the gas station.
We started from the infrastructure. We came up with an electric car
that would have two features that nobody had before. 1) The battery is
removable. So if you wanted to go a long distance, you could switch
your battery instead of waiting for it to charge for a very long time.
And 2) It was cheaper than gasoline car, not more expensive. Because
you didn't buy the battery. You paid just for the miles and for the
car.
DP: So what will you guys make? What will you do?
SA: We sell miles, the way that AT&T sells you minutes. They buy
bandwidth and they translate into minutes. We buy batteries and clean
electrons--we only buy electrons that come from renewable sources--and
we translate that into miles.
DP: What are we talking about here? What's the infrastructure you're building?
SA: We have two pieces of infrastructure. 1) Charge spots. And they
will be everywhere, like parking meters, only instead of taking money
from you when you park, they give you electrons. And they will be at
home, they'll be at work, they'll be at downtown and retail centers.
As if you have a magic contract with Chevron or Exxon that every time
you stop your car and go away, they fill it up.
Now, that gives us the ability to drive most of our drives, sort of a
100-mile radius. And that's most of the drives we do. But we also take
care of the exceptional drive. You want to go from Boston to New York.
And so on the way, we have what we call switch stations: lanes inside
gas stations. You go into the switch station, your depleted battery
comes out, a full battery comes in, and you keep driving. It takes you
about two, three minutes--less than filling with gasoline--and you can
keep on going.
DP: But it sounds like you're talking about a parallel universe, where
there are hundreds of thousands of charging spots and switch stations.
There aren't any.
SA: Well, that's what we're building. If you think of our first
location in Israel, we will have about a quarter of a million charge
spots before the first car shows up. Just like you wouldn't buy a cell
phone on a network that wasn't built yet. You have to first build the
network. And then let the cars come in.
And so we put a massive investment in big infrastructure projects:
Green jobs. A new electric infrastructure for cars.
DP: And has nobody said, "By the way, this is crazy?"
SA: Oh-- about nine out of ten people say it's crazy. But the other
ones are actually saying "Where can I put my money?"
We raised $200 million in a seed round, the largest seed round of any
startup in history. We raised a $135 million a week ago in Denmark to
put the same network in Denmark. We're raising $700 million in
Australia to build this network on the biggest island you can find. So
this is actually getting a lot of support and a lot of funding.
DP: Which governments are actually signing up?
SA: Israel was first. Denmark signed up next. Denmark is the host of
the next climate change conference, and the prime minister really
backed this up: They put a huge tax on gasoline cars, 180 percent tax,
and zero tax on electric vehicles.
Australia signed up after.
Then we went to the U.S. Gavin Newsom, mayor of San Francisco,
coordinated an effort of all the mayors in the Bay area to create the
next transportation island, the San Francisco Bay area. Even though
it's not an island.
Governor Lingle of Hawaii was really the driving force behind getting
us to Hawaii. And then the Premier of Ontario announced about a month
ago that we're gonna go to Ontario. And Ontario, most people don't
know, is the capital of cars in North America. They make more cars
than Michigan these days.
And there's a lot of interest beyond these first six networks that
we've announ
