We already talked about the high hopes for electric vehicles, EV through Project Better Place. Now Project is dropped and Better Place stays.
The gist, Shai Agassi’s vision of an infrastructure to allow EVs to roam around the world has definitely found traction in the form of investors and governments. The brilliant part about Better Place was a futuristic vision to ween our society off of oil.
Who is involved? This is where Agassi’s plan is brilliant and similar to Tesla’s target market with its limited availability Roadster. Project Better Place wanted to test its idea on a small scale to prove it can work to attract investments. Israel was the first to resonate with Agassi’s plan, since it is surrounded with mostly hostile, oil producing countries, it is the perfect place to start the project.
How will it work? It’s not about the cars, it’s about the service. Sounds familiar? IBM let go of its hardware manufacturing business to concentrate on service. Microsoft is also trying to push its web services. Better Place wants to offer EV drivers a network of pay-as-you-go and a predetermined fee for how much electricity according to how many miles would be driven, all through a smart Electric recharge Grid Operator.
What is happening now? By partnering with governments and utilities, Better Place is positioning itself as a serious contender for the future. It has already attracted some serious investors, Idan Ofer with $130 million, with another $70 million from Morgan Stanley, VantagePoint and Maniv Energy Capital. With that, it was easier to partner with Carlos Ghosn, CEO of the Renault-Nissan companies.
The future. Next on its map is Danemark. Once Israel has proven the model to work, Danemark will be the next country to test. With the country’s colder temperatures, it will prove that current battery technology works suitably. So who’s next? We assume Europe, followed by the U.S..
The highs and the questionable. The idea of having a a contract for a predetermined amount of electricity makes perfect sense for those who can estimate their mileage. However, Better Place envisions smart cars that can guess where and how you will be going. Although this makes sense for people, it would be nice to offer choices and let people decide what works best for them. Based on our experiences of how computer systems try to guess our next moves, we have reservations and questions.
We highly recommend the September edition of Wired magazine that has a good article on Better Place. What was appealing was Agassi’s dream paralleles many new business models that have gained traction this last decade.