Metrik Minute

This is Amazing. My mind is truly blown and my heart excited. I mean, this is a project of truly Magnetic, I mean Ionic, I mean ginormogantuan proportions. What is it you ask? Good question!

Shai Agassi, who has an impressive track record in both the tech and software fields, has started a new company called BetterPlace.  This company is in the business of electric vehicles, but not necessarily producing them or selling them.  The company is more focused on making electric vehicles viable.  How are they doing this you might ask? (gosh, you – my imaginary audience, sure ask a lot of questions.  Good thing I have a blog to answer them, eh?)

So his idea is to basically outsource the main problems of having an electric vehicle

• Electric Batteries only take you so far before you have to charge
• Charging so far does not have a wide enough infrastructure that people feel confident buying electric cars

He is creating a company that would take care of both of those problems in one fell swoop (I love saying that :)

Imagine driving a long distance on your electric vehicle and running low on juice.  Instead of shutting down for the night, pull into one of his shops in the future infrastructure he is creating, and swapping out your battery.  Yes, thats right, pull the drained one, stick in the freshly charged one, and you’re on the road in less time than it would take you to pump gas.

Now I know what you’re thinking (I RSS to your mind’s blog, in case you didn’t know) – that sounds expensive and complicated.  It sure does, but its not, so you’re wrong, so :P

His idea is that you own the car, but not the batteries that come with the car.  You lease/rent/borrow/steal those batteries from the company, treating batteries much like we treat gas now.  His network of stations owns the batteries, maintains them, makes sure they run, and switches them out for you.  The company takes care of the charging, swapping, and dealing with anything battery.  You own a car that is flexible to the kind of batteries it can take in, leaving room for competition for which company (gas station) you want to have swap batteries for you.

Exciting, isn’t it?  Well it is for me for two reasons

• the battery outsourcing market means that many companies now have the incentive to compete to make the best batteries, and I imagine if this takes off then industry standards will be adapted creating a lot of competition and variety
• competition and energy (<– no pun intended) in the battery market means that an energy supplying market has incentive to co-evolve with this.  That means more solar, or whatever form of renewable energy is great for the region, is going to be needed, and lots of it.

An additional benefit is that now cars can outsource their battery function to companies that do that really well, and can just focus on making great cars, or personal transportation pods.

I’m really freakin’ excited about this because of the implications.  If this works in Israel, where he plans to implement this, and where the government seems to be totally backing his play and removing all the obstackles, then this could have great implications for other countries, namely the U.S.

here is his interview with Yahoo

Alright, talk amongst yourselves.

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