Batteries Not Included -Clive Thompson
Shai Agassi [pictured above] stood in a warehouse on the outskirts of Tel Aviv and watched his battery-swapping robot go to work. He was conducting a demonstration of the curious machine that is central to his two-year-old clean-energy company, Better Place.
Agassi’s grand plan is to kick-start the global adoption of electric cars by minimizing one of the biggest frustrations with the technology: the need for slow and frequent recharges. The robot is the key to his solution.
Unlike most electric-car technologies, which generally require you to plug your car into a power source and recharge an onboard battery for hours, the Better Place robot is designed to reach under the chassis of an electric car, pluck its battery out and replace it with a new one, much the same way you’d put new batteries in a child’s toy.
Electric cars have long been a fetish object for environmentalists. But now even the auto industry seems to be taking the idea of the alt-car seriously…[y]et [electric cars] suffer from a common problem: refueling.
The idea is a little odd, to say the least: a car with a replaceable battery. It is also extraordinarily bold, requiring carmakers to fundamentally rethink the way they build cars. The electric-car business, in fact, could function like the mobile-phone industry: you could pay, say, $10 for 1,000 miles, $20 for 3,000 miles, or perhaps a few hundred a month for unlimited driving.
The auto industry’s conceptual error, he says, is in regarding the battery as a built-in component of the car, like a gas tank. Instead, you could think of the battery as more analogous to gas itself — an entity that goes in and out of a car as needed, owned not by the driver but by the company that sells you the fuel. The solution to electric cars lay not in re-engineering the battery but in re-engineering the car.
[The] carmaker Renault announced plans to design cars to suit Agassi’s grid.
[New York Times]
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Shai Agassi [pictured above] stood in a warehouse on the outskirts of Tel Aviv and watched his battery-swapping robot go to work. He was conducting a demonstration of the curious machine that is central to his two-year-old clean-energy company, Better Place.
Agassi’s grand plan is to kick-start the global adoption of electric cars by minimizing one of the biggest frustrations with the technology: the need for slow and frequent recharges. The robot is the key to his solution.
Unlike most electric-car technologies, which generally require you to plug your car into a power source and recharge an onboard battery for hours, the Better Place robot is designed to reach under the chassis of an electric car, pluck its battery out and replace it with a new one, much the same way you’d put new batteries in a child’s toy.
Electric cars have long been a fetish object for environmentalists. But now even the auto industry seems to be taking the idea of the alt-car seriously…[y]et [electric cars] suffer from a common problem: refueling.
The idea is a little odd, to say the least: a car with a replaceable battery. It is also extraordinarily bold, requiring carmakers to fundamentally rethink the way they build cars. The electric-car business, in fact, could function like the mobile-phone industry: you could pay, say, $10 for 1,000 miles, $20 for 3,000 miles, or perhaps a few hundred a month for unlimited driving.
The auto industry’s conceptual error, he says, is in regarding the battery as a built-in component of the car, like a gas tank. Instead, you could think of the battery as more analogous to gas itself — an entity that goes in and out of a car as needed, owned not by the driver but by the company that sells you the fuel. The solution to electric cars lay not in re-engineering the battery but in re-engineering the car.
[The] carmaker Renault announced plans to design cars to suit Agassi’s grid.
[New York Times]
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2 comments:
I see his point. But wouldn't it be more suitable to make the energy stored in these batteries to be more similar to fuel or gasoline?
Don't know...frankly the technology is beyond me. Thankx for reading and commenting!
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