Better Place revs up its charge spots in Israel
Shai Agassi hopes Israel is ready to embrace the efficiency and economics of electric cars. His company Better Place rolled out four electric car charging stations in northern Israel. He plans to quickly grow this network so that every place in Israel with be within range of one of their network stations. This is intended to eliminate, the “range anxiety” which frightens some consumers out of considering electric cars. Better Place contracted with French automaker Renault to produce a customized version of their Fluence electric car.
The Fluence will sell for about $32,000– similar to the price of gasoline powered equivalents in Israel. Better Place has already sold 1800 of these vehicles to leasing companies in Israel and hundreds more to individuals. This is a significant, especially compared to the anemic sales of the Nissan LEAF and Chevy Volt in the US.
Better Place’s subscription plan includes a home charging station as well as free access to charging stations in their network. The Fluence Z.E. has Quickdrop battery replacement technology which eliminates one of the inconveniences of previous electric cars, recharging took a long time. A ten gallon gasoline tank contains the energy equivalent of more than 300 kilowatt-hours of electricity.
The battery swap
To put this in to perspective, it would take 200,000 AA sized rechargeable batteries or 3000 typical laptop batteries to equal a gasoline tank’s energy capacity. Quickly pushing that much electricity into a battery isn’t practical without thick wires, dangerous voltages and the possibility of overheating– so swapping batteries is a much better option. This also allows Better Place to use green energy at their charging stations and avoid creating the problems caused by electric cars whose energy ultimately comes from coal or other dirty fuels.
Robotic fueling stations in the Better Place network will swap out a depleted battery in a few minutes. The process is as convenient as an automated car wash. Drivers needn’t even leave their cars.
Electric cars haven’t yet lived up to their promise of replacing the internal combustion engine but they already have significant economic advantages. Currently they live in the economics versus convenience gap between public transportation and gasoline automobiles, but they seem poised to take market share from both.
Author: Brian Nitz
Brian remembers when a single tear dredged up a nation's guilt. The tear belonged to an Italian-American actor known as Iron-Eyes Cody, the guilt was displaced from centuries of Native American mistreatment and redirected into a new environmental awareness. A 10-year-old Brian wondered, 'What are they... No, what are we doing to this country?' From a family of engineers, farmers and tinkerers Brian's father was a physics teacher. He remembers the day his father drove up to watch a coal power plant's new scrubbers turn smoke from dirty grey-back to steamy white. Surely technology would solve every problem. But then he noticed that breathing was difficult when the wind blew a certain way. While sailing, he often saw a yellow-brown line on the horizon. The stars were beginning to disappear. Gas mileage peaked when Reagan was still president. Solar panels installed in the 1970s were torn from roofs as they were no longer cost-effective to maintain. Racism, public policy and low oil prices transformed suburban life and cities began to sprawl out and absorb farmland. Brian only began to understand the root causes of "doughnut cities" when he moved to Ireland in 2001 and watched history repeat itself. Brian doesn't...
“A ten gallon gasoline tank contains the energy equivalent of more than 300 kilowatt-hours of electricity.”
Nope, that is not true. You have to factor in the efficiency of the drive train to know how much miles you can travel on 300 kWh of thermal energg from the petrol and the electricity in your battery. An electric car is about 4x as efficient as a petrol car, so it can go 4x as far on a kWh. I would say a 10 gallon gas tank is equivalent to about 100 kWh electricity. The Tesla Model S has a 85 kWh battery and can travel 265 miles according to the new, more stringent, 5 cycle EPA test.
What a car!!!