Electric car fortunes have had their ups and downs; especially following the collapse of the Better Place electric car network that left hundreds of EV car purchasers with the possibility of being stranded without power over in ISrael. Although some electric car models like Nissan’s Leaf and Tesla sport EVs have made modest inroads, over all, electric cars have yet to capture a sizable share of the world car market.

America’s largest car maker,General Motors, introduced its Chevrolet Volt plug in hybrid model in 2010. GM now hopes to change the way people think about driving electric cars when it markets its new Bolt all electric car sometime in 2017.

In contrast to GM’s Chevy Volt, which has a hybrid engine (both an electric and gasoline engine) the Bolt is a total electric car that will have a driving range of “roughly” 200 miles (322 km). Resembling Chevy’s gasoline driven Sonic hatchback model in appearance and size, the 5 seater Bolt will cost around $30,000. This is after a $7,500 US government tax credit incentive to American EV car purchasers is applied. This will make it more affordable than other similar sized electric models.

A Bolt prototype model made a recent appearance at the popular Detroit Auto Show earlier this year. There, the Bolt appeared to be a better value than other featured EV cars, including Tesla’s new Model 3 and BMW’s i3. Without the government offered tax credit, the Bolt will cost around $38,000; still lower in price than other comparable models. GM does have a lower priced EV car on the market, the smaller Chevy Spark EV car that’s only available in two US states: California and Oregon.

Whether GM’s new EV models reach markets in the Middle East is still anybody’s guess. Israel’s EV car experience, where aging Better Place marketed Renault Fluence EVs are still seen on the roads, has shown that electric cars are not yet being accepted by the general public. The lower price of oil, makes gasoline and diesel cars more desirable, is also a factor, despite warnings by environmentalists linking fossil fuels to climate change and global warming.

For all EV models, including the new Chevy Bolt, the main issue will still be what fuels the power plants that supply electricity for electric cars.

Perhaps solar and other alternative energy’s time has come after all.

Read more on electric cars:

“Driverless” Tesla electric will test run on Israel’s Better Place grid
Happy 2013! A good year for electric cars
Middle East will remain “Leaf” – less as Nissan puts electric car efforts elsewhere

Photo of Chevrolet Bolt EV Car – autoblog/GM :

The post Can GM make electric cars the right way? appeared first on Green Prophet.

He had enough chutzpah to convince investors to bet nearly $1 billion on his grandiose plan to free Israel from the shackles of oil dependency.

Agassi’s inspirational Ted talk entitled A New Ecosystem for Electric Cars won him respect and a standing ovation. He appeared on the cover of Wired magazine and Fast Company celebrated him on its 2009 Most Creative People in Business list.

So what went wrong? How did Shai’s dream of a Better Place turn into a nightmare of chaos and bankruptcy? To learn what went wrong we first need to understand a little bit about Better Place and the history of technology.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FcoJt2KLC9k[/youtube]

The technology wasn’t the problem

Just as Thomas Edison tried nearly everything under the sun before he settled on a carbon filament for his incandescent bulb, Agassi’s team studied everything from railed slot-cars to air powered cars as they searched for a path out of Israel’s oil dependency. They settled on electric cars based on Lithium Iron Phosphate batteries. These batteries have an energy density of 220 Wh/L, twice that of the best lead-acid batteries but more importantly, his Renault Fluence Z.E. cars relied on an innovative charging mechanism where a robot would swap out the entire battery for a fresh one in less time than it takes to go through a drive-through car wash.  Just as Edison developed electricity generation and distribution infrastructure to power his electric lights, Shai made sure that these robotic charging stations were part of his electric car plan. Israel was the perfect place to begin. 1000 charging stations would be sufficient to make sure that the entire country was within range. He made arrangements with Renault to produce 100,000 electric cars.

Underestimating your competition
And this, according to a former Better Place employee interviewed by Fast Company, is where things began to go wrong. Approximately 200,000 new cars are sold in Israel each year. Even Steve Jobs’ reality distortion field would have to stretch to assume that half of Israel’s new car buyers would abandon their Hondas, Hyundais, Toyotas and Fords and flock to his single model electric Renault during its first year of production. As one GM executive explained, “It took the Toyota Prius 15 years to get to 1.5% market share in the U.S., and the Prius is a hit.”

Overselling yourself

As a salesman, Shai Agassi would have given even the venerable Steve Jobs a run for his money. In fact after making comparisons to the growth of the cell phone industry and hyping the possibility that Better Place could be the world’s first trillion dollar company, Shai soon had the ear and money from Israel Corp, Morgan Stanley, Maniv Energy Capital and other venture capitalists. With his reality distortion field on overdrive, Agassi suggested that Better Place cars might sell for half the price of their gasoline competition, a number seemingly pulled out of the air before agreements had been finalized with Renault.

More money than sense
Speaking to Fast Company, former Better Place policy VP Ziva Patir said, “If Shai had raised $50 million instead of $200 million, it would have forced us to focus.” Projects overran their budgets, too many cars were ordered, charging stations cost twice as much as estimated, employees were highly paid in cash rather than in performance-based bonuses and no one had thought to hire managers with expertise in the automotive industry where efficient cut-throat competition is the norm.

An alternative point of blame, government as innovation’s anchor

Michael Granoff, the founder Maniv Energy Capital, one of Better Place’s first investors blames the government of Israel for a tax structure which favors hybrids and punishes electric car manufacturers. Because of this, he told Haaretz he fears that Israel will be the last country in the world to develop a viable electric car industry.

Repeating history
Those who believe in the relentless forward march of technology believe in a myth. A glance at history shows that the path to progress is full of backpedals and pitfalls. For example, the lead-acid storage battery enabled the first practical electric car to be developed in the year 1859. This technology improved until 1911 when the first hybrid was produced and became a commercial failure. We can imagine an alternative history where these early electric car companies invested their profits into the steady improvement of motors, batteries and photovoltaic charging technology. But Ford and other companies had begun the century of the internal combustion engine. Nearly all early electric car companies had failed by 1920. Electric car prototypes and limited production models made appearances in fuel-starved Europe during WWII and again in the 50s, 60s, 70s and 90s but their commercial success was limited by long charging times and the fact that state-of-the art lead acid batteries had only 1/100th the energy storage density of gasoline.

Better Place isn’t the first innovative companies to fail and it certainly won’t be the last. The computer industry is littered with examples such as Altair, Atari, Commodore, Cray, Digital Equipment Corporation, NeXT, Tandem… most of which created technological innovations which were lost for decades or forever after their demise. But for a bit of luck and the gleam in Steve Jobs’ eye, Apple could have easily ended up on that list. The auto industry is no different. Tucker, Edsel, AMC, DeLorean and others have come and gone.

There is a story from my home town about a man named Dr. John Wesley Carhart. He was a Methodist Episcopal pastor and he invented the world’s first automobile in 1871. He entered it in the world’s first long distance car race and drove it around Racine Wisconsin until the noise of its two cylinder steam engine frightened a valuable horse to death. Townspeople convinced him to disassemble it. Like the electric car, its time had not yet come.

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In the aftermath of the demise of Shai Agassi’s Better Place electric car network company,  EV car purchasers in Israel feared they might become stranded due to not being able to recharge or exchange their car’s lithium batteries. Will Tesla, who said they wouldn’t, swoop in?

Rumors have circulated that Tesla Motors, manufacturers of high priced electric sports cars, might soon be introducing their cars into Israel to take advantage of the electric car infrastructure already set up by Better Place.

This rumor became ever stronger due to a partnership between California based Tesla Motors and the Israeli Mobileye company to produce the world’s first “driverless” car.

Using robotic technology to program and steer a car while the driver does something else was once a concept only found in science fiction. But due to technology developed by Mobileye, this fiction may soon become at least partial reality. In an interview at the Marker business section, Mobileye’s co-founder Amnon Shashua tried to set matters straight regarding how “driverless” his company’s system will actually be.

He said: “It’s not automatic driving in which the driver puts an address in and goes to sleep. The system permits control to be transferred to it for a limited time. You can read a text message or switch radio stations and temporarily turn over control.”

Tesla Motors was founded by South African entrepreneur Elon Musk; and named after one of the world’s most innovative electronics geniuses, Nikola Tesla.The cars start in price in the USA at nearly $60,000, with a new 2015 Tesla Motors “Falcon Wing” Model X CUV model expected to sell upwards from $70,000.

Some Tesla models are said to have a driving range of up to 425 kilometers. This positive factor is still not enough to sell Tesla cars to the mass market, as these prices put them out of reach of most car buyers, especially in countries like Israel.

As it looks now, the appearance of a Tesla electric sports car in Israel will be for driverless testing purposes only.

More articles on Tesla and other electric cars in the Middle East:

Driverless car partnership emerges between Tesla and Israel’s Mobileye

Will Tesla’s New Model X Crack the Middle Eastern Market?

Interview With a Betterplace EV Car Owner – Not Stranded Yet

Photo of 2015 Tesla Model X, by Plug in Cars

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According to the Globes business paper in Israel, Better Place’s production partner Renault SA has stopped producing electric cars at its Turkish factory. Renault is expected to have lost hundreds of millions of dollars in setting up and production fees for the cars it has already produced for the now defunct Better Place company envisioned by Shay Agassi (fired by Better Place board late 2012).

Renault also produced a version of the Renault SA Fluence that had a permanent rechargeable battery.

Better Place went bankrupt this past May, while Renault continued producing its rechargeable battery version of the car. Low sales have caused it to close down production of even the rechargeable version of the battery.

The Turkish line would have been able to produce tens of thousands of electric cars every year.

Meanwhile, locally, Renault importer Carasso Motors Ltd. confirms that Renault will continue supporting Fluence ZE cars already sold in Israel. The car will be a collector’s item no doubt in only a few years since only about one thousand of them were sold in Israel up until now.

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The company’s CEO Ran Eloya announced yesterday that he has bought the remains of the trail blazing company after it battled with internal management issues. Less than two years ago the company was valued at $2 billion USD and it was now bought for about the same price of a two room apartment in Tel Aviv.

Better Place’s visionary CEO Shai Agassi was fired around this time last year and by May the trouble was clear: the company filed for bankruptcy that month some six years after it planned to revolutionize the auto industry. Better Place, with Renault, planned to create quick swap battery stations throughout the country to reduce range anxiety in drivers of electric cars.

We just spoke with investor Michael Granoff who is writing a tell all book about his work with Better Place.

According to news reports Eloya said that Gnrgy will maintain some 1,800 public charge spots that service the 1,000 or so electric cars on the roads in Israel. He is not going to sell cars or provide battery swap services, however. 

Acquiring Better Place assets makes sense for the company: Gnrgy focuses on two EV charging solutions, the first being a simple charging management socket which uses existing infrastructure and enables fast implementation of a charging solution for electric cars.

This is especially handy for the residential market where the need is for low cost charging solutions that work in conjunction with the utilities preferred charging scheduling.

The second charging solution is a traditional infrastructure charging spot which requires an infrastructure modification and is operated under our same management network. This solution targets municipality, enterprise parking lots, and government offices where there is a need for a charging solution but under a single energy management network.

I think the $450,000 paid by Gnrgy is going to pay for itself in free advertising: the news of this buyout is hitting the international press as the world waits to see if and how this trailblazing company Better Place returns from the grave.

The post Gnrgy Buys Better Place for the Price of an Apartment in Tel Aviv appeared first on Green Prophet.

With almost a billion in financing and electric battery charge and change stations in place nationwide, at its critical hour Israel’s electric car company Better Place failed. It went bankrupt this year. One of its first investors, and biggest backers Michael Granoff will be writing a tell-all book. He speaks with Green Prophet.

Granoff is the founder of Maniv Energy Capital. The New York-based investment group was largely responsible for putting together nearly $700 million in capital to raise Better Place. He went on to become head of oil independence policies at the company which was led by visionary Shai Agassi.

GIven what has happened to the company over the last year, Granoff fears that Israel may be one of the last countries on earth to develop an electric car industry.

While he promises to leave all the goodies for his forthcoming book, he does blame the government for its lack of support, and the fact that buyers of hybrid cars managed to get tax breaks while those buying electric cars did not. But, he told a local paper: “The fundamental issues were internal. There were mistakes that were made by individuals and so forth.”

About the handling of the company post-liquidation when Kaptain Sunshine and car owners tried to take over the company and then failed, this is what Granoff had to say:

“I thought it was a comedy of errors that was very unfortunate for the creditors and more importantly for the country and the cause of electrification of transportation.  But then again, it would seem that it is entirely in keeping with the government¹s attitude toward that cause,” he told Green Prophet.

We can’t wait to read his book.

Car owners of the Better Place cars in Israel meanwhile are now dealing with the fact that they are left without a viable charge to get around the country. I spoke with one owner of a car in Israel two weeks ago and he says he is not allowed to talk to the media, but that it’s becoming a headache basically. He has a charge point at home, but that’s good for getting around town. Anything outside his range is scary.

Meanwhile read all over coverage on Better Place here.

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Today is D-Day for electric car drivers in condos and apartments in Israel and who use the Better Place charging systems. The Israel Electric Company announced last week that yesterday was the cutoff date. See the announcement above placed in local papers. Anyone not registering their charge stations (previously to Better Place) in their names will be cut off from service.

Some 800 plus people in Israel are driving an electric car fashioned by Better Place and without a centralized billing service, users will likely face charging inconveniences with this new announcement. Problems with collecting due payments from drivers was one of the reasons why potential buyers could not put together enough funds to bring the company back to life.

What’s the background story?

After an emotional take-over by a social activist-turned solar entrepreneur this summer, let’s say within a few short years Israel’s electric car dream at Better Place has gone up in smoke and chaos. Better Place declared bankruptcy earlier this year.

Electric car in Jaffa, waiting for a charge

But the writing was on the wall already when its visionary CEO Shai Agassi was fired late 2012. Self-made union members of existing car owners led by Kaptain Sunshine banded together to buy the assets of Better Place.

With Sunshine and his backers failing to make payments, the company was put back on the block and bought by a company that owns parking garages. A private check wouldn’t do, and so Better Place is now in the hands of liquidators once again.

And no, according to Tesla’s spokeswoman, the company has no interest in taking over Better Place.

Meanwhile Better Place car owners are not being allowed to talk to the media about the situation.

We can assume that their battery switch stations are down, and if a driver hasn’t switched over to the electric company getting a charge to drive out of town will be a big bummer.

The post Israeli Electric Car Drivers Pay the Piper Today? appeared first on Green Prophet.

Since then, several potential purchasers have come forward with offers to purchase Better Place and try to turn it into a going concern. These purchasers included Yosef Abramowitz, a co-founder of the Arava Power solar energy company and known to friends as “Captain Sunshine” ; and an Israeli parking lot network owner, Tzachi Merkur of Success Investments.

Neither Captain Sunshine nor Tzachi Merkur were able to actually come up with the money needed to finalize the deal, which also included the release from the customs authority of 300 Better Place EV cars.

Merkur, who formed a concern called EV Net Group to deal with Better Place, failed to come up at the end of September with 20% of the agreed purchase price of NIS 1.8 ($505,000). Although they did give a post-dated check from a foreign bank, it was not considered by the bankruptcy court as being “acceptable“.

Better Places’ destiny might be tied to a company based in Iceland, Northern Lights Energy, which recently expressed an interest to purchase 1,000 electric SUV’s from AMP Holding Inc. NLE works in both the energy and transportation fields; and has also expressed interest in Better Place. NLE head Gisli Gislason considers Better Place to be “a great value and a great idea. Shai Agassi was a visionary.”

It remains to be seen what will happen next. Local reports are saying that by today Better Place chargers will be disconnected from their power source until bills are paid. You don’t pay, you don’t get a charge.

Photo by Maurice Picow for Green Prophet

More articles on the demise and resurrection attempts for Better Place:

Better Place Taken Over by Parking Garage Company

Can Captain Sunshine Save Better Place?

Interview With a Better Place Car Owner – Not Stranded Yet

The post Latest Purchase Deal for Bankrupt Better Place Company Falls Through appeared first on Green Prophet.

Otherwise known as “Captain Sunshine,” Abramowitz had such a beautiful vision for the electric vehicle company. Instead of perpetuating a capitalist ethos that rewards exclusivity and a hoarder mentality, the Kibbutznik from Boston was poised to create a national green transportation infrastructure that would support all electric vehicles.

We wrote about the news when Abramowitz and the Association for the Advancement of Electric Transport in Israel won the bid to absorb Better Place’s assets, and we couldn’t help but feel giddy about the idealism with which the solar energy guru infused his takeover bid.

It would have been grand, and Israeli would have been a better place for it, but both the liquidator and the Ministry of Transportation made it virtually impossible for Green EV Operation to raise the cash necessary to make its montly $1 million payment to the liquidator – JTA reports.

The Ministry of Transport wouldn’t allow Abramowitz to collect 350 new Better Place cars from port until he purchased an import license, and the liquidator failed to provide a list of drivers to bill for the 10,000 or so battery swaps that took place in the short time that the Captain was in charge.

“To this day neither the cars were released nor was there a functioning database from which to bill users,” Abramowitz told JTA. “This not only killed our cash position but was the deathblow for investor confidence in our business model.”

Instead, after Sunday’s deadline for a $1 million payment came and went, Tzachi Merkur, CEO of Success Parking purchased the company for $3 million, according to JTA.

Let’s hope that this rather unglamorous new takeover isn’t the end of a spectacular dream.

:: JTA

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The company declared bankruptcy in May, but today an Israeli court awarded the liquidation of its Israel-based assets and Swiss-based intellectual property to Yosef Abramowitz and a union of Better Place car owners, who are determined to continue building an open, national technology and serve platform for all current and future electric vehicles.

Better Place founder Shai Agassi had a great vision when he set out to bring both electric vehicles and state of the art battery charging systems to Israel.

He raised an extraordinary amount of money to realize his vision, which culminated in the construction of 37 charging stations, 2,000 curbside charging stands, and 1,000 electric vehicles driving around.

But it was expensive to build what is currently the world’s largest network of EV battery switching stations. Each cost $500,000, such that by the time the company called it quits, they had lost $800 million, according to the Times of Israel.

Plus the management team had lost site of its own vision and nobody, nobody being government officials, was willing to work with them.

Abramowitz, who founded Arava Power and Energiya Global in order to spread good will and solar energy as far and wide as possible, explained to the paper that Shai Agassi was trying to build a monopoly, instead of a national network that would benefit as many EV owners and developers as possible.

And with the country’s richest man, Idan Ofer, at the helm, the government was unwilling to offer any tax breaks. So they failed.

First Agassi was fired from the company he started, and then Better Place officially declared bankruptcy in May, after which the court swiftly appointed a liquidator to find a buyer for the company’s assets.

In the meantime, the 900 or so EV owners who had purchased a $44,000 Electric Renault Fluence from the company were very happy with their purchase and decided to form a lobby or union just before the company’s fall in order to protect not just their financial interests, but also the company’s original ideology.

If they are eventually charged with energy produced by the renewable energy, which is what Abramowitz proposed when Shai Agassi first got started, EV’s could go a long way to reversing some of the environmental damage we have done with gas guzzling cars.

“We are committed to maintaining the 2,000 charging spots and basic battery swap services for all current and future EV drivers in Israel,” said Efi Shahak, Chairman of the EV Drivers Association. “We thank the Court and liquidators for giving Israel a second chance to get it right.”

Whereas Agassi seemed to hoard his idea, Captain Sunshine and Shahak want to bust it open so that it functions as a cooperative that benefits not only Better Place cars, but all electric vehicles that will inevitably enter the country.

“Our vision is to transform the charging network into an open, national technology and service platform for all current and future EVs,” said Abramowitz.

“We look forward to Israelis soon driving and charging Teslas and other EVs that will save money for both drivers and government, fight climate change and keep our air clean.”

They have inherited a broken system, but they have also inherited a lot of intellectual property and investors have already committed to giving them 25 percent of the funds they will need to keep the company running for the next two years.

But they will need more.

“The Company is currently seeking new investment of up to $36 million (USD) by offering both equity and convertible debt participation. We are saving a dream here, so the valuation and terms will be investor-friendly,” said Abramowitz, who will co-chair the Company along with Shahak.

Already so well connected with government officials with whom he has cooperated to get his solar energy projects off the ground, Abramowitz is keen to help build a system that aims to do good, instead of a system whose main goal is to make money.

They expect to break even within 24 months.

Read more about Better Place:

A Better Place Owner on Tesla’s Battery Swap Tech

Uncertain Future for Better Place ZE Owners

Better Place Bankruptcy is a Sad Day for Electric Car Industry

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