Beaker Hill: Shai Agassi of Better Place @ MIT

The lynchpin of the Better Place model is separating the battery and the car, providing significant advantages to its customers. One of the major sticking points with previous electric cars (besides all the weirdness), is the issue of expense/obsolescence. You were asked to pay a hefty premium for the car+battery combination, knowing that there was an excellent chance that a greatly improved battery would be around the corner while your old one was stuck in the car. So Agassi decided to avoid this headache by having the battery be a completely interchangeable commodity, not included in the price of the car itself—as he refers to it, “electric gasoline.”

Then two pieces of infrastructure need to be put into place: recharging stations and battery exchange stations. According to Agassi, most customers will simply be able to recharge their batteries at home and work, and not need to exchange their battery at all. (The batteries used by the company, including some developed by local company A123Systems, have a range of about 120 miles.) The hope is to install charging stations in four main places: in the home and in parking lots at offices, shopping districts, and downtown areas, thus covering the majority of places people park. Automated battery-exchange stations would be on the road like gas stations, for longer trips or for those who forgot to charge up their batteries. The entire system would work like a cell-phone contract, in which consumers pay for the service, not for the batteries themselves.

The other interesting portion of the Better Place system is the advantages it would provide for renewable but intermittent energy sources such as solar and wind. Current technology in these fields has lacked the ability to store the energy gathered—or as the dilemma is often phrased, “what happens when the wind stops blowing?” Through software coordination with power utilities, the batteries associated with Better Place cars provide this energy storage capability, as power can literally be sucked out of the batteries and put into the grid during peak times if necessary. (No word on what happens if you need to use your car…)

To conclude his prepared remarks, Agassi took aim at critics who thought that the quick-deployment model he is implementing (Better Place has deals in place to build infrastructure and begin service in Israel, Denmark, the San Francisco Bay area, and Hawaii) will be an overly jarring transition. Comparing it to the Industrial Revolution, which started in Britain to fill the needs of industry after immediately freeing all British slaves, Agassi claimed that immediate transition is necessary. “We know we’re doing the wrong moral thing today. We’re digging the ground, we’re burning the planet for our kids, we’re giving the money to immoral countries…If you do the right moral thing, and you do it immediately, you win.”

While we’re not entirely sold on Better Place just yet—certainly not until we see the system actually implemented—and have some quibbles with portions of the plan (for example, the near- and over-100% taxes placed on non-electric vehicles by Israel and Denmark in response to signing the Better Place deals), it may indeed provide a portion of the answer to the question which caused Agassi to start the company. “How do you make the world a better place by the year 2020?”