Shai Agassi has a plan.

[caramida]

http://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.

Comments

[enf.livejournal.com]

I haven't actually watched the video yet, but maybe you could be non-passionate about it because an elaborate electric car infrastructure encourages people to still want to drive cars everywhere instead of living walkable or bikeable lives?

[mopalia.livejournal.com]

Wired Magazine did an excellent article on this a couple of months ago: http://www.wired.com/cars/futuretransport/magazine/16-09/ff_agassi

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.

[knaveofhearts.livejournal.com]

Warning: this is based solely on the NYT article as I can't listen to video at the moment.

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. :-)