Electric Cars With Shai Agassi

TW: Agassi has been receiving a fair amount of publicity with his plan to create an integrated network of battery powered vehicles. His plan's core vision is to create a ubiquitous network of battery delivery points whereby users could rapidly swap out batteries whilst traveling at sites similar to gas stations. Users would not own the batteries merely a contract to use the generic batteries obtainable at the stations. With ranges of roughly 200 miles, the concept would seemingly work well amidst metro areas and/or interstate networks.

There is a chicken and egg issue as without the network users will struggle to have convenient access to batteries, without users the network will be difficult to fund. He has test networks going up, we shall see.

From Newsweek:
"...he plans to jump-start the fledgling electric-auto industry by building an entire infrastructure—cars, recharge stations and more—from scratch. Governments in Israel, Denmark, northern California and elsewhere have signed on.

...the infrastructure is a combination of a massive amount of charge spots and the ability to switch batteries in less time than it takes you to fill up with gasoline.

...Our model is not predicated on government subsidies. What governments can do is they can accelerate adoption

...The cost of the battery [averaged out over its lifetime] roughly translates to about four to six cents per mile. The cost of clean electricity translates to about one to two cents per mile. So [our costs are] somewhere between six and eight cents per mile. If you look at the average miles per gallon a car gets in the U.S., [those costs are in line with oil at] $25 a barrel.

...If you look at the North American continent, you actually have about 50 urban centers, which are, on the East Coast, so dense that at least half of them overlap another center. If you look at California, the California area is actually covered with four of these dense circles. Imagine a hundred-mile circle around San Francisco, and another hundred-mile circle around Sacramento, and again the same thing in Los Angeles and San Diego. In between those you have three freeways connecting [northern and southern California]. On these freeways, if you put switch stations at a distance of about 30 miles from one another, you would have full coverage across the entire state"
http://www.newsweek.com/id/178851