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
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.
"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.
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).
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?
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.
iPhones don't utilize public roads and aren't really a necessity in getting to work. Cars are for most of those without a public transport option.
If I can't buy gas from Shell with an Exxon fuel filler of a particular model car and there are mostly Shell stations in my area, I'm not buying that car.
Standardizing will only benefit electric car manufacturers. Surely, they can all get together and agree to one standard as they will benefit from any third party willing to create a charging station franchise. IMO non-standard in this case is a very poor business decision.
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).
