Over the last few months I have become more aware of some issues that seem to drag our civilisation down a dirty black hole and so have been trying to find what other people are proposing to drag us out of it. One of these proposed solutions comes from a new company called Better Place
Essentially what Better Place is, is a business model to progressively replace fossil-fueled powered cars with electric ones, and I don’t mean ‘hybrids’ but fully Electric Vehicles (EV).
You may think that EVs are small car-like things that can harldy go beyond 30mph and which tend to be driven by pensioners. If so you may be surprised to hear that a great majority of independant car manufacturers seem to go for the sports car and some models are quite sexy… if you’re into sports cars that is… which I’m not. What I’m after is a clean vehicle that doesn’t pollute, doesn’t rely on a rapidly diminishing supply for fuel, is quiet and efficient.
Shai Agassi, founder of Better Place uses the mobile phone network model for his business model. He proposes to build a network of charging stations on the already existing electric grid and sell you a contract per miles where heavy users may even get a free car. When you acquire a car, they retain ownership of the battery, which allows them to bypass the problem of the current lifetime of batteries for EVs (usually around 100 miles) by also setting up swapping stations where you can simply change your battery in a specially designed station in less than 5mns.
Now this may sound rather complicated and the infrastructure may seem like something hard to put in place but the truth is, many places around the world have already signed up to test-drive the system. Countries like Israel will act as the primary test place (with the support of President Perez). Denmark is another one ready to jump in with the extra KWH that their wind turbines produce at night. Other places on the ‘sign me up’ list include Australia, Japan, the state of Hawaii, the state of Ontario and the city of San Francisco.
They’ve also partnered with the Renault-Nissan group to produce a prototype of a regular sedan. Forget sports cars and little cars, this is aimed at the large consumer market.
I’m not particularly good at presenting things in a thorough manner but if you still have questions (like where the electricity comes from in the first place), check their presentation video below:
Find more videos like this on Planet Better Place
I’m quite aware that it’ll take a while to have EVs become mainstream but I’m also hopeful that it’ll happen sooner rather than later.
Edit: Check out Shai Agassi on TED Talks, it’s quite powerful!
More From jeanloup
Tags: Better Place, EVs
