Stan Beer
Thursday, 24 January 2008 12:00
Opinion and Analysis
Page 1 of 2
Most of us are familiar with how mobile phone plans work. You get a subsidised handset and sign a contract to pay a monthly fee for a certain number of minutes of talk time and other services. Now apply that model to electric cars, except that instead of a handset you get a subsidised car and instead of minutes you buy kilometres of driving distance. This bold venture is taking place in Israel right now and it has big backers including two global auto makers, a software entrepreneur, an Israeli billionaire and the Israeli Government.
The brains behind the venture is none other than
Israeli American Shai Agassi, former president of the product &
technology group and executive board member of German business software
giant SAP. While the venture is using Israel as its test bed to build
an electric car infrastructure, the ideas are coming out of Palo Alto
in the heart of Silicon Valley where Agassi's company Project Better
Place is based.
Under the joint venture arrangement, car makers Nissan and Renault will
supply the electric cars, while Project Better Place will supply
Lithium Ion batteries and build a ubiquitous electric car
infrastructure throughout Israel, which will include 500,000
parking-meter-like charging points on Israeli streets and service
stations where spent battery packs will be replaced with freshly
charged packs within minutes.
The Project Better Place venture is not unlike the way the mobile
telecommunications industry is run today. A carrier provides the base
stations and network while through its channels it sells handsets made
by Nokia, Motorola, Samsung and others together with usage plans.
The battery packs provided by Project Better Place, which are claimed
to have a range of about 200km, will not be owned by subscribers to the
scheme but will be part of the service infrastructure where users pay
for the number of kilometers driven. Users who charge batteries from
their home will be given a credit for the kilometers they put back into
batteries, not unlike the way electricity users with solar panels are
given credit when they supply energy to the grid.
Agassi's vision of getting the first electric cars on the road in
Israel by 2009 and 100,000 by 2010 is being given plenty of backing in
high places. Israeli industrial mogul Idan Ofer is reported to have
invested $100 million in Project Better Place and is chairman of the
company, while the Israeli Government has promised to keep taxes on
electric vehicles at a low 10%.
