TW: See our prior post on Agassi here. Here is an update. He is plugging along. I will say it seems the auto companies are really starting to head down the path of integrating electric powered vehicles (at least hybrids) into their core offerings. These things take a long time to ramp up but then when the tipping point is reached the transition can happen very quickly. We shall see.
From Economist:
"...his start-up, called Better Place. Its goal is to build a global network of charging points and battery-exchange stations to make electric cars a mass-market proposition.
...Mr Agassi has not yet fully proved that he can deliver the goods. The test will come in the next few months, as Mr Agassi’s ambitious scheme begins in earnest. Even as he prepares to unveil his firm’s first battery-swapping station in Japan this month, sceptics have started to speak up, casting doubt on Better Place’s elaborate business model after months of adulatory media coverage.
...Mr Agassi’s firm does not make cars. Instead, his novel approach is to look at electric transport as a system in which cars, batteries, recharging points, electrical utilities and billing systems must all work together. It is, in other words, a systems-integration problem of the kind he used to deal with at SAP.
Better Place’s business model involves selling electric cars (provided by its partner, Renault-Nissan) using a scheme borrowed from the mobile-telecoms industry—charging not by the minute, but by the kilometre. Customers will be able to pay as they go or sign up for a contract that includes a certain number of kilometres. They will even get a subsidised car if they subscribe to big enough packages, just as mobile operators subsidise handsets for their highest-paying customers. Better Place will build networks of recharging points, plus battery-swapping stations along motorways that will, in effect, enable customers to recharge their cars in minutes in order to travel further than the 160km (100-mile) range of their cars’ battery packs.
All this will be a highly profitable business, says Mr Agassi: the low cost of electricity compared with fossil fuels will leave Better Place plenty of room for arbitrage, and customers will still end up paying less per kilometre. Clever software will enable utilities to use the batteries in Better Place’s fleet of cars to cope with fluctuations in supply and demand, recharging them at night when demand is low and feeding power back into the grid at peak times.
...Some sceptics say consumers will prefer to buy electric cars that plug into ordinary electric sockets than to be “locked in” to an operator of recharging points. Even if Better Place can build its networks, say others, it will not be profitable for years because the infrastructure is so expensive (its battery-swapping stations cost $500,000 each).
...The company has developed a robot that can swap a car battery in 40 seconds. It is already installing recharging points in Israel, where it hopes to have 100,000 in place by 2010 and 500,000 by 2011, along with 100 battery-swapping stations.
Electric cars’ inherent drawbacks, says Mr Agassi, will not vanish soon: batteries are expensive, and they cannot be charged in the time it takes to fill a tank unless there is a power station next to each charging point. Only when the battery is physically and economically separate from the vehicle, he insists, will electric cars be cheap and convenient enough for the mass market..."
http://www.economist.com/people/displaystory.cfm?story_id=13570470
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