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Page added on May 20, 2012
Israel becomes lab for electric car network
Israeli entrepreneur Shai Agassi has begun rolling out the world’s first nationwide electric car network. Now, will the drivers come?
After more than $400 million in outlays and months behind schedule, dozens of electric cars have hit the road in Israel, the test site Agassi chose for his Better Place venture. Four stations where the cars can get a new dose of juice when their batteries run out are operating, and the plan is to ramp that number up within months.
The concept: to wean the world from oil and eliminate the biggest hurdles to environmentally friendly electric cars — high cost and limited range.
To do this, Better Place has jettisoned the fixed battery. Instead, drivers can swap their depleted batteries for fully charged ones at a network of stations, receiving a full, 100-mile range in five minutes. Better Place owns the batteries, bringing down the purchase price of the cars using the network.
People driving shorter distances, the vast majority of customers, can plug in their batteries each day to chargers installed at their homes, offices and public locations, which will fully recharge in six to eight hours.
He faces a wall of skepticism. A major concern is “range anxiety”: Will the car conk out because its battery is drained, stranding the driver in a dicey neighborhood, en route to the hospital, or with three wailing kids in back?
Rising fuel prices worldwide still haven’t sent electric car sales surging, noted U.S.-based automotive expert John McElroy. “It may not be an energy price issue,” he said. “Consumers may simply decide that electric cars don’t offer the range they need.”
Agassi, a former top executive at software giant SAP AG, said he is ready to prove his doubters wrong. “We’re driving a car that most people said would be a fantasy,” he said.
The swappable battery model aims to reassure drivers about range and show they don’t need to sacrifice convenience or cash to switch to electric.
So far, the four Better Place battery stations are set up in central and northern Israel. During the second half of the year, around 40 stations are due to be operating across the country. But even before that, the company says enough will be up that a motorist could make the 300-mile drive from Israel’s northern tip to its southern end.
Agassi has raised $750 million from investors including General Electric Co. and HSBC Holdings PLC since founding Better Place 4 1/2 years ago.
French automaker Renault has begun selling a sedan, the Fluence, customized to use the stations, priced in Israel at roughly $32,000, comparable to other sedans sold here. Currently, about 140 are on the road, most driven by Better Place employees.
The Fluence should start becoming available to the general public within weeks. Leasing companies, which buy about two-thirds of the more than 200,000 new cars sold annually in Israel, have ordered more than 1,800, and private customers have ordered several hundred more.
Compared to electric or hybrid cars in other markets, the sales numbers in this nation of nearly 8 million might not be as humble as they seem: In 2011, Chevrolet sold about 7,700 Volts and Nissan sold under 10,000 LEAFs in the U.S., which has a population of more than 310 million.
“It interests all fleet managers we talk to,” said Shai Dahan, CEO of Eldan Transportation, a top Israeli leasing group.
Better Place, which had promised to have thousands of cars on the road last year, acknowledges the rollout is behind schedule, mostly because of bureaucratic hurdles and production issues at Renault.
Better Place has also spent years testing its integrated system designed to allow its operation center, which is connected to every car, to monitor the vehicles and correct problems remotely. For instance, its software notifies drivers when their batteries are running low and directs them to the nearest switching station.
Israel sales director Zohar Bali predicts up to 5,000 Fluences will be silently running on Israeli roads and highways within a year.
Israel was chosen for the experiment in part because of its tech-savvy population. Also, with 80 percent of the population living in a narrow, densely populated stretch along the Mediterranean coast, it provides a perfect laboratory for the charging network.
Better Place claims it can shave up to 20 percent off the annual cost of owning a car, especially if gas prices, now around $8 a gallon here, continue to rise. Drivers buy access to the switching stations and charging spots through a monthly package ranging from under $300 to over $500, depending on mileage.
Israelis are taking notice. Better Place says more than 80,000 people have trekked to its visitor’s center, situated at an abandoned oil reserves depot outside Tel Aviv.
What happens in Israel could decide how broadly Better Place deploys.
So far the Fluence is the only model compatible with the grid, but Renault’s Middle East director, Jean-Christophe Pierson, says the company is considering a more compact model. Better Place is also in contact with other carmakers.
Denmark is set to become Better Place’s second launch site this year. Australia is to become its first major market, with deployment in the capital, Canberra, also this year. Small-scale projects are in place in Hawaii and California. Amsterdam is the next European target after Denmark.
The company also has its sights set on China, where it already has opened a demonstration battery switching station.
Agassi sees the “tipping point” for electric cars coming in two to three years, propelled by dropping prices of cars and batteries. By 2017, he expects 50 percent of all new car sales in Israel to be electric.
The largest investor is The Israel Corp., whose holdings include Israel’s biggest oil refinery and deep water oil drilling.
Idan Ofer, whose family controls The Israel Corp. and who serves as Better Place’s chairman, said he saw no contradiction between his oil and clean-tech holdings.
Film giant Kodak “knew about digital photography. And look what happened. They still went bankrupt because they didn’t do anything about it,” observed Ofer. “There are many examples. I don’t want to be there.”
15 Comments on "Israel becomes lab for electric car network"
MrEnergyCzar on Sun, 20th May 2012 2:28 am
Good luck…
MrEnergyCzar
BillT on Sun, 20th May 2012 2:32 am
What a farce! The entire country is smaller than California, has as many people as New York City and an average income 30% lower than the US. Again, who is going to buy these cars and who is going to pay $300 to $500 per month to fuel them? Fools?
And they can forget their China dream. Why would China want to take in a competitor when they only have to buy one and ship it to their labs? And, swapping batteries is the only way it may ever make electrics work, but only in a small country. The several hundred thousand gas stations in the US will never switch in numbers to make it work. Besides, what guarantees that you will get a good battery, fully charged? None!. Nope, dream on electric car fools. Ain’t going to happen here.
DC on Sun, 20th May 2012 3:04 am
Gm sold 7700 of its pseudo-evs because even in a nation the size of the US finding 7700 idiots with money to burn is not that difficult. Now the Leaf, a true EV, argueably the better vehicle by every measure sold 10k largely due to production bottlenecks. But that aside, the problem that the US of Sprawl just insnt friendly for anything that inst 3 tons and runs on gas. The left would have a lot better range if it would ditch all the uselss onboard connectitety garbage and shed a lot of surplus weight, whoes only real prupose is to limit the leafs range…oddly enough.
Now Isreal…sure a small country like the would be a great place to start EVs, except the plan is to replace communter gas-trash bins with Electric ones. No plans to limit car-sprawl, or use EVs solely for govt and public transport, but as drop in replacements for gas-burners. Well..good luck with that. Battery swaping on a national scale is a stupid idea anyhow. How many 10s or 100s of millions of batteries would even an average size nation trapped in car-dependency need to keep on hot-standby fully charged at all times? What would that cost, and how will all those massively heavy batteries be moved around in the 1st place?
Yea…good plan there Agasi… A billion Evs wont make the world a better place, but I suspect you kinda knew that all along…
Anvil on Sun, 20th May 2012 7:01 am
Its gotta start somewhere.
Archimedes on Sun, 20th May 2012 8:49 am
What a waste of money this project is !
The world’s biggest fleet of battery-powered vehicles is forklift trucks. They operate in warehouses and distribution centres of companies like Walmart, IKEA, CocaCola, Nestle, etc…
These companies are switching their forklifts from batteries to fuel cells and hydrogen.There are thousands already in operation. Do they already know something Mr Agassi doesn’t ???
Arthur on Sun, 20th May 2012 9:25 am
Israel is very small and very sunny. If there is a country where it might work, it is Israel. The prices for pv panels have dropped substantially lately. Too early too dismiss this project.
BillT on Sun, 20th May 2012 10:56 am
Really? Only blind ‘investors’ think it has a future, but then there seems to be a lot of those lately. There is another name for them, fools. Just like the ones expecting to get rich from Facebook. In less than 10 years, it will be gone. Especially if they try to charge for their services. 900 million will drop to 900 over night.
As for “has to start somewhere”. Why? A failed idea should just die a quiet death. No one seems to look beyond the dollars at the total picture. This one has too many obvious faults to ever go beyond a rich man’s toy.
BillT on Sun, 20th May 2012 11:00 am
BTW: If Israel is as stupid as it seems to be today, it will likely be a ‘lab’ for destruction by 1.4 billion Muslims. They are only outnumbered by 160 to 1. And there are more Muslims born every 90 days than there are people in Israel.
Ham on Sun, 20th May 2012 11:29 am
The question remains on electric cars is at what point does supplies of lithium and copper become critical? Well, the latter definitely is, although it can be recycled. As for the former, Bolivia has by far the most lithium; however the caveat is, it is all up a huge mountain and probably needs vast amounts of oil or diesel to get it down. So the whole enterprise is BS.
Not forgetting that there really is no such thing as an electric car, they are gas cars and Egypt has just cut the supply. War with Iran? Forget that, it will sink the World economy.
Israel being a small Country would be better off promoting bikes and walking. This involves getting off the suicidal money system, this is what we all will be doing sooner or later anyway.
Kenz300 on Sun, 20th May 2012 1:12 pm
Bring on the electric, flex-fuel, hybrid, CNG, LNG and hydrogen fueled vehicles. It is time to end the oil monopoly on transportation fuels. We need a choice at the pump. Oil companies love it when oil prices spike. They make huge windfall profits. It is time to transition to safe, clean alternative energy.
BillT on Sun, 20th May 2012 2:51 pm
Kenz…do you have all these canned replies ready to just plug in without any real thought? There are no ‘alternates’. Name one that does not require any metals / scarce minerals / oil to get from the lab to the store. Just one. Then throw in the billions needed to actually mass produce any of them. Then throw in the FACT that incomes are shrinking and economies are collapsing all over the world.
The systems we have today were built over decades when energy was plentiful and cheap. Both are no longer true and we do not have decades to make any real transitions. We will just continue to contract until we hit the bottom. If you are under 30…take up farming and learn how to drive a team of horses or mules. Internet…gone. Cell phones…gone. TV…gone. If you are lucky enough to live another 30-40 years, you will see all of this.
Arthur on Sun, 20th May 2012 5:15 pm
Bill, there hardly is a lower limit to the energy footprint of information exchange except zero. Voyager-2 is still sending pictures with 160 bits/second to the earth **from outside the solar system**. The internet was designed without energy conservation motives. Meanwhile tablets operate on near-infinitesimal energy requirements like 2 Watt. That’s freaking nothing. You can generate the energy required for 4 hours tablet operation (8 watt-hour) by cycling 3 minutes on a hometrainer with dynamo (150 watt). Developed nations will always be able to generate these levels of energy, long after the car (1 car = 50 KW = 25.000 iPads) is gone.
The internet is here to stay.
– 19th century: coal, steamers, steam trains, rail tracks, steelmills
– 20th century: oil, 4 lane roads, cars
– 21th century: data, internet, wind, solar, water + horses.lol
Mass transport with cars, planes, trains exit.
Bob Owens on Sun, 20th May 2012 5:19 pm
We need to give this a chance, people. This plan can benefit lots of cities and small communities. It is possible and needs to be tried even if it fails. I don’t see it failing. It seems to be integrating what is needed: small cars, home charging, swap stations, reasonable cost with financing or renting. We can learn a lot from this. We only need large vehicles once in a while and can rent them when needed.
John Orr on Sun, 20th May 2012 7:24 pm
I’m sorry BiilT but I wish you would put your knowledge to a solution rather than.*.*.*.*.* all the time!
Steve M on Mon, 21st May 2012 12:18 am
John Orr well said! Bill T, we need solutions, not just discounting everything for the sake of it. I understand that this is a screwed up situation, but we need to work it out in some way. At least try to do so. I would rather go down fighting than just go down.