Better Place founder Shai Agassi is ready to show off that he's applying his software industry experience to improve electric vehicles.
At the Frankfurt auto show on Tuesday, the electric car service company will show off in-car software designed to ensure that electric car drivers have enough charge to keep driving.
Code-named AutOS, Better Place's software alerts drivers to a car battery's charge status and points them to battery charging spots and swapping stations in the company's network.
In conjunction with the launch, partner Renault is also expected to debut a concept car called Fluence ZE, a five-seat all-electric passenger car that will be able to operate at Better Place's battery-swapping stations. The two companies have committed to producing 100,000 of the sedans, which have a 100-mile-driving range, for Better Place customers in both Israel and Denmark by 2016.
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YOKOHAMA, Japan--As the mock-up electric Nissan Dualis crossover halts over the service bay, two robotic shuttles immediately start scurrying below.
One latches onto the underside of the Dualis, swiftly pulling out a spent battery pack. The other then lifts a fully charged pack into place. A green light, and away the driver goes. All in under a minute.
Welcome to the future of electric vehicles, as seen by Better Place. The Palo Alto, Calif., company aims to build an international network of battery-swap stations for electric vehicles.
The battery swap system, which made its global debut in concept form here, hopes to brush aside a major barrier to electrics: their high price.
Instead of paying thousands extra for a car because of its lithium ion battery, customers would pay piecemeal to use a battery supplied by Better Place. When the battery runs low, drivers switch it for a fully juiced one.
The business plan looks more to mobile phones than to gas stations. Customers can pay for every mile they drive or buy a fixed-rate plan that allows unlimited miles and battery swaps.
Better Place plans to open battery-swap stations in Israel and Denmark sometime next year, and in California and Hawaii six to nine months later. The company will provide swap-and-go batteries for electric vehicles from Nissan Motor Co. and Renault SA.
Last week, Nissan said it will start making electric vehicles in Japan at its Oppama plant in the fall of 2010. Initial capacity will be 50,000 cars.
"In 2011, what you'll see is on the magnitude of tens of thousands" of the battery packs, Better Place founder and CEO Shai Agassi told Automotive News. "At 2013, you'll be at hundreds of thousands." He reckons each station will cost $500,000.
But the battery-swap system faces its own hurdles. Unlike gas tanks, which can go almost anywhere on a car, batteries must be under the floorboard in the middle of the car for the robots to make the swap.
After the spent batteries are removed, they are recharged in 20 minutes. Refrigeration keeps the batteries cool and prevents damage during the high-voltage charging. But repeated quick charges degrade battery life.
While Nissan and Renault are Better Place's only partners so far--hardly enough to gain critical mass--Agassi said he was in talks with other automakers.
"We were in serious discussions with 10 companies," he said. "The main reason we haven't seen other car markets move is we caught them in the worst 18 months of the history of the car industry. And during that time, most car companies scaled back research and development."
(Source: Automotive News)
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• CNET drives the Audi A6 3.0T Sedan
• Ford admits electric Focus will have limited appeal
• Watch automatic battery changing station in action
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Better Place on Tuesday showed off an automated electric vehicle battery-swapping station which takes about one minute to slip in a fresh battery.
The station in Yokohama, Japan is part of a government-sponsored test around electric vehicles. The vehicles being tested are modified Nissan SUVs that run entirely on batteries.
Fill 'er up: Better Place's electric vehicle swapping station being tested in Japan.
(Credit: Better Place)The switching stations use robotic battery "shuttles" on a track system that remove a depleted battery for recharging and insert a fresh battery.
As the batteries are on the bottom of the car, a driver goes up a ramp and stays in the car during the battery exchange. The battery shuttles are designed to work with a variety of different battery sizes
At this site in Japan, the batteries are charged from a large solar photovoltaic array, making it zero-emissions driving, according to Better Place.
Better Place's business model is to sell customer a subscription service to charge batteries, which are owned by Better Place. Customers get access to charging stations at home and in public places as well as battery-swapping stations for longer rides.
The anticipated range from the electric cars--Better Place has signed on Renault-Nissan as a provider--will be about 100 miles. The company is setting up a network of charging stations in Israel and has agreements with other locations, such as Denmark, San Francisco, and Australia.
In an interview last month, Better Place founder and CEO Shai Agassi said that the company plans to test its components, such as battery-changing and car-charging stations, this year in anticipation of a market roll-out in 2011.
(Credit:
Martin LaMonica/CNET)
Shai Agassi is famously persuasive. With just an idea, he was able to raise $300 million to launch Better Place, a venture that plans to build electric car charging spots and battery switching stations in Israel, Denmark, San Francisco, and many other places.
He was able to convince Carlos Ghosn, the CEO of Renault-Nissan to build electric sedans with a battery pack that can be swapped out at Better Place's robot-assisted stations.
People in the auto industry seemed intrigued with Better Place's business model, where the company owns the batteries and the consumer buys a monthly contract to charge their cars.
But apart from Renault Nissan, no other automakers have signed on with Better Place. And industry executives have voiced skepticism on various aspects of Better Place's ambitious plan: Can one company build an electric vehicle charging infrastructure and operate it profitably? On a technical level, can battery packs be standardized in size for automated battery changing?
Said another way, nobody doubts that Agassi is a visionary with good intentions--to reduce the world's dependence on oil to help preserve the planet. People just wonder if he can make a business of it.
Next month, Better Place will show off a key piece of its technology in Yokohama, Japan: an automated system to switch out batteries. Cars drive up a ramp and a robot quickly removes a battery pack and puts a fresh one in.
During a talk at the Fortune Brainstorm Green conference on Tuesday, Agassi said that the company plans to test its technology components this year, test its charging networks next year, and then have "mass market" roll-out in 2011.
After his presentation, I sat down with Agassi, an Israel-born former SAP software executive, to get a better idea of where Better Place is going.
Question: This is a hugely ambitious project. Do you ever doubt that you're taking on too much?
Agassi: Not at all. Look, engineering is a very interesting discipline. You get into a room, you design, design, design. You write a bunch of white papers and you build a prototype. If you've built a prototype, the next question is can you build at scale and will it last?
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A Better Place-compatible Nissan Rogue in Hawaii.
(Credit: Better Place)This interview was originally posted at CNET Australia. We have reposted it because the U.S. faces similar challenges to Australia in adopting electric-vehicle technology.
q&a We sat down with the CEO of Better Place Australia, Evan Thornley, to discuss how his company plans to make the electric car a reality in Australia.
Last year we reported on Better Place's deals with various national and state governments, such as Israel, Denmark, Hawaii, and California, to roll out infrastructure to assist in the adoption of electric vehicles (EV) from about 2011 onwards. This infrastructure will primarily consist of battery exchange stations, where drivers of Better Place compatible EVs can have their nearly depleted battery pack swapped out for a fully charged set, and EV charging points, located in homes as well as public places.
At the end of January, Evan Thornley was appointed as CEO of Better Place's Australian operations. Thornley was a founder of LookSmart and recently quit his seat in the Victorian State Parliament on the eve of his elevation to the ministry, raising the ire of the state's Liberal opposition. He and Guy Pross, the company's director of government affairs, sat down for a chat with CNET Australia about how Better Place plans to convert Australia's car fleet to electric vehicles.
CNET Australia: So why was Australia chosen?
Evan Thornley: Well, we think that this system works best for high-kilometer drivers. So the best way to prove that was to target a country which has plenty of those.
Could you please elaborate on how your system "works best for high-kilometer drivers?"
ET: Once the recharging infrastructure exists and the battery's sitting in the car, then, if you pay full commercial price for renewable energy, the energy costs of driving one kilometer down the road in an EV is about 1/7th the cost of driving that same kilometer using petrol.
Australia spends AU$20 billion to AU$30 billion a year on petrol, depending on the oil price and the currency. If we're able to convert the whole fleet over, then the renewable energy costs to power that fleet would be around AU$5 billion a year.
Who do we create the most value for the quickest then? The people who drive the most number of kilometers, because that's when we're displacing the largest amount of petrol. These drivers are the most attractive for us because, when you look at the lifetime cost of a car, much of it goes into the petrol tank not the vehicle itself.
... Read MoreJapan's Ministry of the Environment announced a program on Tuesday to test electric vehicles and a network of charging stations, some supplied by auto start-up Better Place.
The electric vehicle feasibility study will give local governments access to 50 electric cars for several months. Cars included are Mitsubishi Motors' iMiev, the Plug-in Stella from Subaru, the Honda Clarity fuel-cell vehicle, and the Erezo electric motorbike under development.
Better Place will install battery exchange stations in the trial. The deal in Japan is similar to those made recently with several countries, the city of San Francisco, and the state of Hawaii that have signed on with Better Place, which has developed a system to accelerate electric car use through battery leasing and automated swapping.
The trial is part of Japan's national goal of having electric cars make up half of all new vehicle sales by 2020. The program will also include a facility for rapid car battery charging.
Automakers say they need an infrastructure, such as charging stations in public places, for their electric car programs to take hold.
The first electric versions of familiar sedans from the likes of Nissan and others will start becoming available in 2010, but they will largely be used for testing. Broader availability of these cars will be in 2011 and 2012.
Better Place aims to bring its electric-car charging network to the Bay Area, where plans are afoot to promote battery-powered vehicles.
(Credit: Better Place)
Better Place aims by 2012 to bring a $1 billion electric-car infrastructure system to the California Bay Area, whose leaders unveiled policies Thursday to fast-track the adoption of electric cars.
The Palo Alto, Calif., start-up will apply its unique business model, followed in Israel, Denmark, and Australia, of providing the public stations to charge vehicles and swap out leased batteries.
Shai Agassi, Better Place founder and CEO, said he hopes to wrap up permitting in the Bay Area within the next year, roll out the infrastructure in 2010, and fine-tune its technology over the next several years as more electric cars come to market.
"We need to stop the conversation of whether this is Detroit versus Silicon Valley, whether this is Michigan versus California, and we need to start talking about this as the next generation of the car," he said. "We hope that by the time we deploy, we'll see our friends from Renault and Nissan but also the three U.S. manufacturers developing cars that have a plug, and have the ability to drive around the city and charge as they go."
Mayors Gavin Newsom of San Francisco, Chuck Reed of San Jose, and Ron Dellums of Oakland joined Agassi at San Francisco City Hall, promising to launch policies in December to support companies and consumers adopting electric cars. (The event was broadcast online via Webcast.)
Among their plans are expedited permitting for car-charging outlets with incentives for businesses and garages installing them or providing battery-swapping. The mayors also pledged to standardize regulations across the region, working with clean-air and transit programs.
"I believe the big game changer is electric vehicles and plug-in technology," said Newsom, explaining that transportation accounts for 40 percent of greenhouse gas emissions in California and exceeds 54 percent in San Francisco.
Widespread usage of electric vehicles over two decades would save consumers $175 billion in fuel costs and bring a $120 billion boon for battery makers, according to early results of a study by the Venture Lab at the University of California at Berkeley.
"Look what happened when we built ARPANET in 1979," said Robert Kennedy Jr., describing the rise of the personal computer. "The reason for that is we created the infrastructure that made it easy for manufacturers and consumers to take advantage of the technology." Kennedy is partner and senior adviser of VantagePoint Venture Partners, the biggest investor in Better Place.
In statements, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi praised the electric vehicle announcements for the potential to boost the economy and reduce pollution.
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