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caramida at 03:01pm on 10/12/2008 under change the world
caramida at 03:01pm on 10/12/2008 under change the worldhttp://webcast.berkeley.edu/event_details.php?seriesid=f2949e45-1545-444f-b6aa-f03349e1966a&p=1&ipp=15&category=
Shai Agassi, Founder & CEO of Better Place has an idea about how to build an electric car infrastructure with a cell-phone economic model. Of course the words cell-phone model don't describe it quite right. Anyway, the link above is a link to both audio and video for the event where he describes it. You can download it to your iPod, you can set it to play in the background, whatever. Somebody please watch it and help me figure out a reason to not be passionate about this stuff.
Edited: There's an article in last week's NYTimes about this, too.
Shai Agassi, Founder & CEO of Better Place has an idea about how to build an electric car infrastructure with a cell-phone economic model. Of course the words cell-phone model don't describe it quite right. Anyway, the link above is a link to both audio and video for the event where he describes it. You can download it to your iPod, you can set it to play in the background, whatever. Somebody please watch it and help me figure out a reason to not be passionate about this stuff.
Edited: There's an article in last week's NYTimes about this, too.
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Sounds great, doesn't it? And pleas like "we should all take bikes" fall on my deaf ears, since asthma and other minor disabilities make biking or walking not possible. If we had urban transit systems like the Europeans, (or eve NYC) I'd use them, but when it's a 3 hour commute to get from Mountain View to SFSU, I'm driving, thanks.
This is crazy talk, and not the good kind.
Cell-phone minutes plans only work because minutes aren't tangible objects which are stockpiled and maintained in strategic locations but windows of time on the RF spectrum communicating with existing networks. Batteries are currently expensive, heavy, environmentally unfriendly, and high maintenance -- not ethereal abstractions.
This is about as crazy as suggesting that bridge capacity can be expanded by placing tons of pontoon bridges at current bridges -- all you have to do is just float out the pontoons and open up lanes. Yay.
The assumptions required for this idea to be viable exceed my personal limits of credulity. I have no problem resisting the urge to be passionate. :-)
Re: This is crazy talk, and not the good kind.
Miles (driven) aren't tangible objects which are stockpiled and maintained in strategic locations either, but are windows of time and space on the existing road and energy networks.
Yes, batteries are expensive, heavy and inefficient, so what if someone else was handling the battery issue, and all you had to do was drive the car.
If you could, for example, pay X pennies per mile and exchange your car battery anytime you need to for a fresh battery (because the infrastructure is already there, because the battery switch takes 60 seconds, and because it's included in your mileage plan), and X was a smaller number than you pay for your gas car, would it still be crazy talk?
Re: This is crazy talk, and not the good kind.
He's not really selling miles, though. He's selling amps. Some of those amps are in an unpalatable form factor, others are just being resold from the power company. There's no real innovation there.
Yes, batteries are expensive, heavy and inefficient, so what if someone else was handling the battery issue, and all you had to do was drive the car.
If "someone else" has to handle the battery issue, they have to do it in a way that's environmentally sound *and* cost-effective or else it's just a big waste of time and money -- and if it's here in California, it'll be my tax money in some proposition like we saw this past election. :-P
If you could, for example, pay X pennies per mile and exchange your car battery anytime you need to for a fresh battery (because the infrastructure is already there, because the battery switch takes 60 seconds, and because it's included in your mileage plan), and X was a smaller number than you pay for your gas car, would it still be crazy talk?
I just can't handwave away the creation of that kind of infrastructure. The only way to come close to an "anytime exchange" model is to replace every gas station with a battery-replacement station and it's just too expensive. As for the sixty-second hardware swap, I work in hardware, I don't see that really being possible for something the size, weight, and awkwardness of a battery which stored enough zots to do anything useful.
If it were possible to somehow solve the infrastructure problem and the battery swap problem and have it be cheaper than I'm currently paying for gas? Sure. Am I gonna let the government increase the cost of my gasoline back up to four bucks a gallon to pay for it? Hell no.
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The actual times for battery swapping that Agassi has mentioned are in the 3-5 minute range, not one minute.
Even if it's doubled to ten minutes, the key thing is that battery swapping is generally an exception. He also mentions calculating the average user will only need to swap batteries every 2-4 weeks. Unless you drive > 60 or whatever miles one way a day. To put it in perspective, their plans call for "250,000 charging ports, 200 battery-exchange stations" in the Bay Area. If swapping time doubles, you just need 2x the parking area at stations, and you can try to sell more things to people while they wait.
Brian, my main scepticisms are:
* Can enough batteries be made? Ie, is there enough lithium?
* May be leaning toward over-designing the tech in the system. Too many blythe mentions of using robotics (even for the charging stations, though it seems they will use a simple hand-plugged system at first). Developing their own "OS". Some of this might be a function of Wired reporting on it.
* Centralizing control (dispatch of vehicles to charging and battery swap stations) and payment. In another interview, he says he wants to be the "Google of electrons". Including the privacy issues and lock-in, apparently. Might be a nice business model, but rubs me the wrong way. Not enough that I'd pass up the subsidised car if they pull it off though. ;-)
I don't know if I'm convinced, but he has done a pretty good job of convincing me that I _don't_ want to but a hybrid, or a Chevy Volt.
Re: Better Place is a clever name.