Running notes from the TED conference in Long Beach, CA.; first posted on www.stltoday.com, my newspaper’s website.
Shai Agassi has an audacious goal: Transform the United States into an electric car driving nation. Agassi, once a rising star in the technology world, spelled out his vision for accomplishing this at the TED conference Thursday afternoon.
The key, he said, is building electric cars that are affordable and convenient enough that 99 percent of the population can own them. They need to be cars that are as good as those people are driving today.
“Affordable is not a $40,000 car and convenient is not one that you drive for one hour and charge for eight,” Agassi said. “So the question is how do you do that , within the science we have today, within the economy we have today and how do you do it from the consumer up?”
Agassi’s answer: People own the cars, but not the batteries, which are costly and have limited charging life. Under his plan, there would be would be charging stations and battery-swap stations everywhere. “You create the network before the cars show up,” he said.
People basically would buy miles for their cars. “A whole new business model. You’ll pay for miles like you pay for your cell phone,” Agassi said.
He estimates it would cost about eight cents a mile when his start-up company, Better Place, brings the first cars to market in 2010 and will drop to two cents a mile by 2020.
Agassi’s company is working with the governments of Denmark and Israel to build the charging network for such a system. Nissan-Renault has pledged to spend $1.5 billion building the cars. He said he is focusing his efforts to bring the system to the United States on Hawaii and San Francisco.
Agassi, an Israeli entrepreneur and software engineer by training, was on the verge of becoming CEO of the German software giant SAP when he resigned to pursue this project.
You can find details of Agassi’s plan on his website and you can see the TED conference’s blog, photo and Twitter feeds here.
TED, which stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design, is an annual conference that draws some of the world’s leading scholars, scientists and business and technology figures.
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