Oh, and by the way: trickle-charging on a 220V plug takes up some 6-7 amps. Less than a toaster.

“Spiking the grid” my foot. It’s the Better Place reps who raised this bogey-man to clueless electric-company and government officials. They acted like the fox in the henhouse, and ended up shafted. No tears over that.

As to Agassi “analyzing thoroughly” the situation more than anyone else: this “thorough analysis” apparently led him to introduce a brand-new variation on the brand-new concept of EVs, to a society and economy totally unprepared for it.
Also, I wonder what kind of “thorough analysis” leads someone to build the entire national infrastructure before any serious cash inflow has been generated. Speaking of which: simple arithmetic, as well as some admissions published in the Israeli press, suggest that the actual per-station costs of Better Place were upwards of $2 million a pop, rather than the formally quoted half-million.

Wrong about Agassi.

In 2010 they went to the government, asking for regulations on EV charging (there were none). They ended up essentially writing these regulations for the clueless government. And what an overreach it was. They excluded any charging except by a company with a centralized control room. In other words, anyone except Better Place.

This was leaked by Haaretz and caused serious PR headaches. So the government loosened the regulations somewhat, and issued some PR junk brochures in English to get people off their backs.

But to this day, the official Israeli regulations still outlaw simple trickle-charging of EVs from the home plug. This is how we charge our Nissan Leaf. Fortunately, we are expatriate Israelis, otherwise we’d be breaking the law every night. This outlawing, unheard of anywhere else, was clearly tailored to ward off competition from non-switchable EVs such as the Leaf, and even more so from easier solutions such as the plug-in Prius.

So yes, Better Place has built its entire business model upon monopoly and upon captivating the individual consumer (they catered mainly to company fleets who buy the employee’s cars for them; but they failed). No need to try and put lipstick on that pig. They deserved to fail. It’s the 900 Fluence ZE drivers who don’t deserve to be stranded, and we should be thankful to Abramowitz for stepping in. If in the process he sends some hints in Agassi’s direction (hints that are very polite in Israeli terms), he’s fully earned that right and Agassi has earned far worse than that.

I spoke with Abromovich yesterday, who with car owner partners and investors, has taken over the company: the problem with the original model seems to be that the Israeli government didn’t want to give “breaks” to Idan Ofer, an oligarch. That and the company didn’t really connect with the “people” in Israel. I will be writing about our conversation soon. Stay posted.

Thanks, Tafline. I think your sentence in the article, “,,, the management team had lost site of its own vision and nobody, nobody being government officials, was willing to work with them,” definitely hits the mark. But I think that Abromowitz’s claim that Shai Agassi was trying to build a monopoly misses the mark. Mr. Agassi always said that he welcomed competition, but asked only that the electric plug used by his competitors be to international standard. Of course, it goes without saying that to use battery-exchange stations, the battery would have to be suspended under the vehicle, not under the hood or otherwise permanently attached to the car.

I re-viewed a number of Shai Agassi’s video lectures on YouTube and found that Mr. Agassi had always envisioned Better Place as a support network for ALL electric cars. The battery swap stations, according to him, could handle a range of batteries from the vertical type in the Fluence ZE to the flat type in the Tesla Model S. The government helped Better Place to some extent by ruling that electric car owners could not simply plug in their cars to their home’s electric outlets. But this break was, I believe, less due to Better Place lobbying, attempted monopoly or other influence and more because the power companies did not want their loads spiking when EV owners plugged in at home or at work. Better Place offered a computer-controlled network that could smooth the power load by not charging all cars from the moment they are plugged in. Shai Agassi acknowledged that car owners could plug into their home outlets, but warned that, if that practice ruined the battery, Better Place would hold the car owner liable.

Also, when Shai Agassi was asked where additional electric power would come from, he said, on numerous, occasions, that he wanted it to come from clean sources such as solar (Israel) or wind (Denmark).

Many of Mr. Agassi’s solutions have been criticized, but it is hard to know whether the critics are correct or whether they have not thought the problem through as thoroughly and systematically as he has.