StartupCafe

Better Place is best known for its marketing effort on the deployment of an infrastructure to make electric vehicles viable. Their solution is simple: get car manufacturers to sell electric cars on a large scale, and build a network of battery swapping stations spread across the country. This removes the main technological limitation batteries have compared to combustion engines on gas tanks: range.

Renault-Nissan will be starting the production of their first non-prototype electric vehicle from 2011. The three vehicle models will be sold in Israel and Denmark. According to Wikipedia, Israel is 22,000 km2, whilst Denmark is 43,000 km2, and Scotland is 79,000 km2. One of Better Place’s goals is to try to recharge batteries with as much renewable energy as possible, making electric vehicles much cleaner than their gas siblings.

From our point of view, Better Place is a startup. Shai Agassi, the CEO, used to be the president of  SAP’s product and technology group. He joined the company through a M&A, as the founder of his own company. He raised hundreds of millions of Dollars from venture capital funds for Better Place in just a few months. I can only recommend you check out the presentation he did at TED earlier this year.

My argument for Scotland: it is a relatively small country with large amounts of unpopulated areas. It would be extremely easy to deploy an electric vehicle infrastructure on the populated islands, and on the country’s main transport arteries: Edinburgh, Glasgow, Aberdeen, Inverness, and Fort William. Scotland has an unlimited supply of wind, which makes it ideal for building wind farms which can be used to recharge batteries.

Better Place

TED: Shai Agassi on Electric Cars