

Israel to Get Electric Car Battery Swap Stations  - srl
http://www.technologyreview.com/energy/37982/

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smtf
There is a very informative overview (video presentation) of this model at
Ted:

<http://www.ted.com/talks/shai_agassi_on_electric_cars.html>

by the Better Place CEO Shai Agassi.

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typicalrunt
Excellent idea. And one I had thought about for many years.

Unlike gasoline where we own the fuel in our car, it actually makes better
sense for the batteries in our car to be a service. Every "gas station" just
acts as a dead battery replacement depot.

The only bottleneck I can see with this model is the depot's recharging units.
If too many people show up at the same time, there may not be enough stock of
charged batteries to go around.

On Top Gear UK a few years ago, Jay Leno was interviewed and he made a point
about the viability of electric cars. Paraphrasing, he said that until
electric cars can recharge as fast as a gasoline car (i.e.: 5 minutes to pump
fuel into a car) the electric car is always going to lag behind fossil fuel
vehicles.

BetterPlace is at least a step in the right direction.

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jessriedel
> Paraphrasing, he said that until electric cars can recharge as fast as a
> gasoline car (i.e.: 5 minutes to pump fuel into a car) the electric car is
> always going to lag behind fossil fuel vehicles.

This could actually be a selling point for electric cars. Once standard
battery specifications are agreed upon, there's no reason the engineering
couldn't get good enough to swap batteries in under a minute.

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PotatoEngineer
My main worry about battery-swapping is that batteries die after a while. At
some point, you're going to show up to the battery-swap station expecting a
battery that goes 100 miles, and get a battery that only goes 50 miles. That
won't be a problem most of the time, but for a few edge-cases, you can strand
someone.

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mc32
One would hope the batteries (or the station) would know how much energy is
stored in each battery --maybe offering a discount (credit) on the
subscription if the battery is below certain energy threshold. 10% discount on
a battery with 80% energy store of a new one, for example.

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roc
I'm not sure how this model incorporates the demand for better batteries.

Blue Rhino works because propane is a commodity and no-one is really shopping
for larger quantities of propane, or the ability to put the same amount of
propane into smaller vessels. But batteries for electric cars are still
undergoing massive innovation; not only in capacity, but in charge/discharge
rates (for more-efficient capturing via regenerative braking and more-
efficient transfer to the motors).

If Better Place is charging a flat-rate by the mile, what incentive do they
have to offer better batteries? Their profit motive would seem to skew heavily
toward freezing the characteristics of the launch-packs and running with that
as long as possible; allowing improvements to feed their profit margin up
until the moment of customer revolt (should that happen).

Allowing people to pay more to 'upgrade' to larger capacities or 'performance'
packs would add to the inventory they need to keep on hand at their swap
stations and complicate the process.

I guess my concern is that this plan reads as a bold bet that contemporary
100-mile pack performance is good enough.

And truly this isn't a question of servicing most people's daily commute,
which I believe is under 30 miles for most everyone most everywhere. But when
calculating the hassle involved in taking such a car on weekend trips or
vacations, I don't know if 100-miles is going to cut it. Particularly as
battery estimates tend to be fair-weather estimates, and the longer trips tend
to be highway trips at speeds sub-optimal for efficiency.

Will people put up with stopping every sixty or seventy minutes for a 'swap'?

I know it seems silly to think about the annoyances of trips taken maybe a
dozen times a year. But consumers are not always rational. In the end, 100
miles and recharging every hour may not wind up attracting more customers than
the existing 40 to 50-mile range electrics.

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6ren
They might not have a strong motive to improve - but if consumers are saving
30% pa, that will be enough to provide happiness for a while.

Competition is the thing that's supposed to encourage improvement - if Better
Place can actually make it work, competitors will presumably get funded. It's
not just actual competitors, but also potential competitors. A danger then is
an oligopoly (where competitors work in concert; a virtual monopoly. Adam
Smith has a saying that men of the same trade seldom meet without a scheme to
defraud the public being hatched).

But they do have some motivation: more efficient batteries would use less
electricity (cost) but give the same kilometers (revenue); fewer changeovers
would increase consumer usage (more revenue), and make it attractive to the
next segment of the population (more users) - and, perhaps especially, make it
viable for larger cities/countries where a greater range is needed to attract
even a sliver of early-adopters.

NOTE: Battery tech does improve, but _really_ slowly. It's the least of their
problems. funfact: electric vehicles were actually in use about 100 years ago,
and edison (for one) was involved in improving battery tech.

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nyellin
The article is from July.

I was surprised to hear Better Place described as a California startup: Shai
Agassi is an Israeli entrepreneur; almost all Israelis can describe Better
Place, but no one knows the company is incorporated in the states.

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dmix
Wikipedia says that Shai lives in San Francisco. He also became wealthy in the
valley.

Better Places is headquartered in Palo Alto.

I remember reading the story a while back and Isreal is just the first place
they are running the experiment due to its size and government acceptance to
the idea. But the goal is to deploy the cars in as many countries as possible:

"Better Place says it intends to expand into markets where the business model
economics and investor returns are “optimized”, citing Europe and Asia
specifically. "

~~~
nobody3141592
Israel might be a good place to trial this. It's fairly small so fewer 100mi
trips, most commutes are relatively short.

They have more strategic reasons than most countries to minimize their
dependence on oil.

You generally don't need lots of waste heat from the engine for 6months of the
year.

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jbm
What depresses me most about this news is that the first thing I thought about
after reading it was "I wonder if environmentalists can use this to sell
electric cars to right-wingers.".

Very nice to see this sort of development, regardless of where it happens.

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6ren
They have some charge stations installed in Melbourne already
[http://www.betterplace.com.au/drivers/charge-spot-
locations....](http://www.betterplace.com.au/drivers/charge-spot-
locations.html)

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berntb
The article from July talks about what will happen the rest of the year. Since
it is November, anyone got a good link about the present situation?

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rplacd
Been a long time since I read about Better Place in Wired way back in '07.

