

Electric car startup Better Place liquidating after $850 million investment - hornbaker
http://m.cnet.com/news/electric-car-startup-better-place-liquidating-after-$850-million-investment/57586236

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roin
This is a real shame. Shai Agassi is a great visionary, but perhaps Better
Place bit off more than it could chew. I had the pleasure of seeing him speak
at MIT in 2009, and I think all of us left the room thinking that Better Place
was going to lead us into the electric car future. Here is his TED talk:
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FcoJt2KLC9k>

~~~
logicallee
I wanted to answer the question for myself, "If I click on the TED talk, can I
see any indication that this 'great visionary' was a sham who would run a
company into the ground "after raising $850M" (our title). Note that I have
ZERO background information and didn't even read the article. You're going on
1) the title 2) my interpretation of the video linked in my parent post.

Now look at this. It's a 19 minute video.

1) @0 seconds into the video. First words out of his mouth after applause: "So
how would you run the whole country without oil?"

This establishes an anchor of - "WOW". He never gets back to this premise.

Lesson: start with something completely batshit insane.

"that's the question that sort of hit me about 4 years ago, and it never left
my brain".

2) I started playing with it like a puzzle. The original thought I had, it
must be ethanol...

i.e. take credit for alternative "thoughts" meaning existing market solutions.

"I researched ethanol, found out you need the Amazon in your back yard in
every country". Not only the Amazon in your backyard (possibly doable) - the
amazon in your back yard in every country!

So, the competition is completely out of the question. Ridiculously so - but
you're not attacking them, it's something that was "your first thought" after
"speaking to researchers."

3) About six months later I figured out it must be hydrogen, until some
scientist told me the unfortunate truth. You actually use more clean electrons
than the ones that you get out of hyrdogen.

(No comment - I don't get 'clean electrons' but overall this point seems OK
for me)

4) through a process of wondering around I got to the thought, if you could
convert a whole country to an economy of electric cars that are clean and
affordable, you could get to a solution.

This is really good, I thought.

5) how do you scale it so it's used by 99% of the populatiopn?

6) needs to be as good as any car you hvae today: more convenient, more
affordable.

7) the pitch continues fine here I thought.

From time to time though he says something COMPLETELY inappropriate. "Now that
last mile - last foot, in fact". What, completely inappropriate usage of this
term.

"Moore's law" never to any extent applied to any battery technology! It's not
even the same DOMAIN. Only a really dumb VC would say, "Sure, Moore's law,
great." That is is rdiciulous.

[http://cdn.physorg.com/newman/gfx/news/hires/panasonicbat.jp...](http://cdn.physorg.com/newman/gfx/news/hires/panasonicbat.jpg)
is how you actually see batteries improve.

"nobody wants to buy a miniwell when they buy a car." ridiculous as battery
only just stores charge.

"In a sense this is 0 carbon emission" eMile. what. anything, even just
manufacturing something, takes carbon emissions.

"That's how I solved it in my head, as a white paper."

(my paraphrase:) "The president personally asked me to not be CEO of SAP
(Europe's largest software company) so I could run this thing."

"100x growth in less than 5 years"

"car 1.0 - we'll solve everything within the car itself" (I get the analogy
with web services but it's a ridiculous comparison)

"we're looking at car 2.0"

"just like cell phones - you'll pay for the miles. our cars are actually going
to be cheaper than gasoline cars." (just ridiculous ridiculous stuff)

"we decided to dig up instead of digging down- what if we found oil" (talking
about windfarms)

the two numbers we need to think of are 0 - 0 carbon emissions- and infinity -
Infinity in scale.

"We're going to go to 0 before the world ends." Wow, that's an ambitious
timeframe!

"200 years ago too, there was a discussion in terms of an immoral source of
energy that was responsible for 25% of Britain's energy output: slaves".
Right.

"After some discussion they decided to stop slavery and the industrial
revolution started within less than one year."

Then they had 100 years of economic growth.

If we don't we will lose our economy right after we lose our morality.

In summary I did this exercise just to see if I could see any clear
indications that this is not a pitch to entrust your money with. I could.

On the other hand, I plan on incorporating every one of these batshit insane
policies - from starting with something ridiculous, to a story about how
anything else that can get there doesn't work, to bullshit anchors in VC
terminology such as last mile and Moore's law and cell phone subsidies, to the
fact that this moral issue used to be raised and the way it was resolved in
the past is the best thing to have ever happened to an entire class of people.

Contact me at the address you see in my info if you are ready to make a $10M
investment.

------
cheeseprocedure
An exec in the renewables sector once told me that battery subsystems in
electrics and hybrids were so proprietary and critical to design that the idea
of standardizing them across major manufacturers would never happen in the
near term. It's a shame; Better Place's model was fascinating (but the idea of
being locked into one manufacturer is not appealing).

~~~
revelation
They don't even manage to standardize a charging port. And its not like there
are special pink electrons.

~~~
eksith
This is what really bothers me. We have USB, VGA, DVI, RJ-45, 3-pin electrical
(well, that's one hiccup across countries, but at least it's usually the
consistent in the same country), why is it so hard to standardize a multiphase
port?

~~~
Yoni1
Do iPhones use standard MicroUSB? The non-standard port is a business
decision.

~~~
CognitiveLens
in Europe, they have to (albeit with an adapter) due to EC regulations. Seems
like a positive use of government regulation, and with the amount of
government interest in electric cars, my outsider view is that a federal
standard for charging ports would not get an excessive amount of lobbying
resistance.

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ColinWright
Discussion: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5770316>

Alternate source: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5770284>

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randallu
Sometimes you build it and they don't come... hard to tackle big
infrastructure as a startup ($850M doesn't sound like much to build a
nationwide anything infrastructure).

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SolarUpNote
Is it possible for batteries to progress to the point where they could have
300+ mile range? Or charge in under 10 minutes?

If not, it seems like battery switch stations are inevitable.

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anxx
Is it normal for a company to go down with no indication of it on its webpage?

~~~
auctiontheory
Yes. See also: www.myzeo.com

