Better Place is a venture-backed American-Israeli company based in Palo Alto, California that develops and sells transportation infrastructure that supports electric vehicles. According to Shai Agassi, the company’s founder and CEO, his vision was inspired by a question asked by Klaus Schwab at the 2005 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland: “How do you make the world a better place by 2020?” Better Place announced deployment of electric vehicle networks in Israel, Denmark and Hawaii in 2008 and 2009. Better Place plans to deploy the infrastructure on a country-by-country basis. The company has said it is in talks with more than 25 additional regions around the world. Australia, Ontario, Oregon, and California also have announced deployment of Better Place electric car networks. The first customer deliveries began in Israel in the second quarter of 2012. This followed the earlier production deliveries of 100 Renault Fluence Z.E. in January 2012 allocated among the company’s employees.
The company opened its first functional charging station (a power outlet, not a battery swap station) in Israel the first week of December 2008 at Cinema City in Pi-Glilot, and additional stations in Tel Aviv, Haifa, Kfar Sava, Holon, and Jerusalem were announced. Better Place’s primary R&D facility is located in Tel Aviv. The company was publicly launched, as Project Better Place, by Shai Agassi on October 29, 2007. As of January 2011 it has already raised $700 million and about a third was spent in setting up the battery switch stations. Also several countries and states have offered tax breaks. In January 2008, Better Place announced a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with Renault-Nissan to build the world’s first Electric Recharge Grid Operator (ERGO) model for Israel. Under the agreement, Better Place will build the electric recharge grid, and Renault-Nissan will provide the electric vehicles.
Renault will offer electric models of existing vehicles, like the Mégane sedan, but at competitive prices that they claimed would be similar to gasoline models. Better Place implements a business model wherein customers enter into subscriptions to purchase driving distance similar to the mobile telephone industry where customers contract for minutes of airtime. The initial cost of an electric vehicle may also be subsidized by the ongoing per-distance revenue contract just as mobile handset purchases are subsidized by per-minute mobile service contracts. Their goal is to enable electric cars to sell for $5,000 less than the price of the average gasoline car sold in the US; otherwise, the impact of electric cars will be minimal. For example, the Prius hybrid has been sold for 13 years at a price of $4,000 more than other gasoline cars and has captured less than 2% of the world wide car market.
The Better Place approach enables manufacturing and sales of different electric cars separately from their standardized batteries like the way that petrol cars are sold separately from their fuel. Petrol fuel is not usually purchased upfront, but instead is bought a few times a month when the gas tank needs filling; similarly, the Better Place monthly payment covers electric “fuel” costs including battery, daily charging and battery swaps. Better Place will allow customers to pay incrementally for battery costs including electric power, battery life, degradation, warranty issues, maintenance, capital cost, quality, technology advancement and anything else related to the battery. The per-distance fees cover battery pack leasing, charging and swap infrastructure, purchasing sustainable electricity, profits, and the cost of investor capital. All battery concerns burden only Better Place who then bundles the costs and bills their customers monthly for providing all of the infrastructure. The Better Place electric car charging infrastructure network implements a smart grid software platform using Intel Atom processors and Microsoft .NET software, or comparable vendors.
This platform is first of its kind in the world that enables Better Place to manage the charging of hundreds of thousands of electric cars simultaneously by automatically time-shifting recharging away from peak demand hours of the day preventing overload of the electrical grid of the host country. Better Place will be able to provide electricity for millions of electric cars without adding a single electricity generator or transmission line by using smart software that oversees and manages the recharging of electric cars that connect with Better Place. Better Place encourages governments to mandate the use of international standards and open access to recharge across charging networks to facilitate competing networks. Standardization efforts such as SAE J1772, however, have not yet yielded global consensus as of August 2009. Better Place has displayed Charge Spot charging stations that use a connector with the same pin layout as SAE J1772-2009 but housed in a non-standard, triangular plug. They have also displayed a wall mounted charging station using Mennekes/VDE-AR-E 2623-2-2 IEC 62196 receptacle . Battery pack switching outside of Better Place’s network will not be allowed. Better Place has pre-sold enough contracts to make their first deployed network in Israel profitable at launch. CEO Shai Agassi states that the company’s plan is to have the network’s electricity generated entirely by renewable energy from solar arrays and wind farms if necessary, thus invalidating the applicability to the company of the “long-smokestack” argument against electric vehicles, which relies on the source of the electricity.
However, achieving the 100% renewable energy goal may depend on the local electric grid’s energy sources. In Israel, where the first Better Place deployment takes place, the electric grid is based mostly on fossil fuels, rendering the renewable energy vision practically impossible in the short term. The first prototype car is the Renault Laguna with a battery instead of a fuel tank and an electric motor instead of an internal combustion engine. The battery for electric vehicles is a Lithium iron phosphate ion device. The range of the car running on just one battery is from about 160 kilometres (100 mi) to 190 kilometres (120 mi). By replacing the battery at a battery switch station, the range between longer charging stops is limited only by the geographical distribution of the battery-swapping infrastructure. The second demo car is the Nissan eRogue, an electric car based on the Renault-Nissan Rogue, half way between a sedan and an SUV in size. The Renault Fluence Z.E. was announced at the Frankfurt Motor Show on September 15, 2009 as the first electric car to be available on the Better Place network using a switchable battery. Shai Agassi said that EVs must be sold $5,000 cheaper than the price of the average gasoline car to be successful. In April 2010 Renault announced that sales of the Fluence Z.E. are scheduled for 2011 in Israel, Denmark and the rest of Europe. In August 2010 Better Place announced a non-binding order of 100,000 Renault Fluence ZE and 4 months later Better Place claimed to have sold 70,000 cars from that order, a year away from the public launch of the Better Place network. The floor-mounted battery packs in these electric cars are designed to be changed out robotically in less than 2 minutes, less time than the average petroleum refuel, allowing for battery-swap services like those proposed by Better Place and Tesla Motors. Better Place expects battery packs to cost between US 4¢ and 5¢ per mile over their life, provide the cars with a 160 km (99 mi) range per charge, perform for 2000 recharge cycles, and last for 8 years. With areas around cities covered with battery switching stations, also called battery-swap stations, drivers would potentially have electric cars with an unlimited driving range for long distance trips.
The QuickDrop battery switch system will enable Renault Fluence Z.E.’s battery (the first vehicle to be deployed in the Better Place network) to be swapped in approximately three minutes at bespoke battery exchange stations. While each exchange station will cost $500,000, Better Place CEO Shai Agassi has said that cost would be half the price of a typical gas station. In order to access the battery switch station, Better Place customers would have to swipe their membership card. The remaining process is fully automated, similar to going through a car wash, so the driver never has to leave the car. In Better Place’s demonstration battery switch stations, a robotic arm removes the depleted battery and replaces it with a full one and the driver is back on the road. During 2010, Better Place operated a demonstration battery switch station in Tokyo allowing three specially equipped cabs to exchange their car’s depleted battery pack for a 100 miles (160 km) fully recharged one in 59.1 seconds on average. Better Place is using the same technology to swap batteries that F-16 jet fighter aircraft use to load their bombs. Better Place battery switch stations are claimed to support multiple battery types of all kinds of electric cars as long as the battery can be removed from under the car.
A battery switch station using only 15 batteries has the ability to swap batteries for 2,500 EV’s. Better Place claims it has battery station installation teams that can install one battery switch station in just 2 days, one every 25 miles in every route and at the same cost of 7 days of oil in the US, Better Place claims it could cover all of the US with battery switch stations and all the required infrastructure. The main alternative technology to Better Place battery switching is DC fast charging. A nationwide fast charging infrastructure is currently being deployed in the US that by 2013 will cover the entire nation. DC Fast Chargers are going to be installed at 45 BP and ARCO locations and will be made available to the public as early as March 2011. The Better Place subscription model has customers effectively paying only the prorated mileage cost without any battery ownership hassles. The fast charging model has the customer bearing all the upfront battery purchase, ownership, maintenance, lifetime charge retention degradation, and replacement costs, in addition to the electricity costs to recharge the battery. Conventional “gas stations” should vastly outnumber fast charging and battery switch stations, because drivers will usually recharge (“refuel”) electric cars at home, offices, shopping centers, commercial areas, and elsewhere.
Drivers only need alternatives if they forget to recharge, couldn’t get to a charge spot, insufficient time at a charge spot, or are driving non-stop in excess of 100 miles typical of long distance vacations and business trips. Exaggerated concerns about electrical grid impact have been raised especially about fast charging. Fast-charging might add momentary fluctuations to the electrical grid, but the grid itself won’t be affected unless an improbably large number of fully drained electric cars begin simultaneous fast charging. The greater concern with DC fast chargers is providing power to multiple cars at the same time. Say, two cars are plugged in, then the fast charger’s 50 kW draw on the grid would be doubled to 100 kW. This is a local (non-grid) station economics concern about having multiples of expensive 50 kW feed-ins for the unusual circumstance of needing simultaneous fast charging of multiple cars. Instead of demanding multiples of power for simultaneously fast charging multiple cars, the “fast” recharger could deliver half the power to two cars simultaneously for twice the duration, or three cars for at least tripled duration, and so forth. Battery switch stations would not suffer from the multi-car slowdown of DC fast charge stations, since multiple batteries would be waiting fully smart grid slow charged in advance.
While Better Place battery switch stations cost around $500,000 each, DC fast chargers that the EV project will deploy cost only between $25,000 to $40,000. DC fast charging is presently considerably slower than Better Place’s 59.1 seconds battery-switchover. The same DC fast chargers can recharge the battery of the Nissan Leaf to 80% in 30 minutes (around 50 miles) because the car’s software controls the rate of charge and not the fast charger. The fast charging model also might limit useful driving range if frequent fast charging reduces battery lifetime or capacity. Even if future fast charging and car battery technologies enable fast charging at much greater speeds than are possible today, and even if network constraints preventing substantial spread of fast charging stations are overcome, Better Place may remain attractive because their business model of selling the car without the battery lowers the upfront price of their cars relative to gasoline cars of similar size. Just watch the impressive videos here bellow and pay a visit to the link after to get more info.