Will Israel's Electric Cars Change the World?

[oberliner]

Shai Agassi, the founder of Better Place, the most sophisticated electric-car enterprise in the world, projects the ebullient confidence of a man facing a giant wave of money. "Within less than this decade the No. 1–selling car in the world will be the electric car," he says. "It's the biggest financial opportunity the world has ever seen. We're seeing a $10 trillion shift in an industry in less than a decade. It's the Internet, and add another zero."

In the introduction to Start-Up Nation, Dan Senor and Saul Singer's best-selling paean to Israeli innovation, Agassi was the soft-spoken software wiz who had a brilliant idea and a terrible time locating a backer. That doesn't seem to be a problem anymore. "Not when you've digitized the most expensive molecule on the planet," he says. "We've digitized oil." He pauses. "I'll put it this way: We have people from China here."

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2066975,00.html#ixzz1L45O2fPx

[Scuba]

1. I wondered what they were doing with all the aid we give them....

...pouring it into R & D is smart.

[Confusious]

2. Cars are a waste of time and money

The infrastructure also soaks up tons of money better spent.

[Terry in Austin]

3. Actually, there's no such thing as an "electric car"

There may be electric vehicles of some description that will see some degree of deployment, but "The Car" is a fundamental American institution that conforms to some very particular expectations.

When we say "car," it means a personally-owned, two-ton, mile-a-minute lounge on wheels that can accommodate an entire nuclear family with X amount of stuff and can go an unlimited distance with only brief stops in a hugely expensive and pervasive service infrastructure.

The places it takes us are all laid out and built to serve its needs and habits. It is an extravagant creature whose evolution was shaped by a temporary abundance of cheap fossil energy.

In this sense, an EV isn't meant as a direct substitute for a car. After all, the very point of EV's is to be more modest in the use of energy. Our present infrastructure evolved according to the traits of the internal-combustion automobile, and is not particularly well-adapted to electric vehicles.

Language matters. It shapes the way we think about what we need to do. We have a car system, with an interacting combination of specific elements, some of them huge. It's a little superficial to think we can just plug-and-play, where we substitute "cars" that happen to run on batteries and then keep on going with the system we're so attached to. An EV is not a "car" in the same sense -- it will need a system of its own.

It all starts by asking the right questions. For example, the question is often framed in terms of needing "highway safe" EVs. It would be a lot more productive to turn that around and consider "EV safe" highways instead. That would be a start.