Why better place will fail

As you think of fleet applications you need a solution that can match gas in charge and not speed. Fast charging is not available in mass. The challenge will not be can the battery be charged in five minutes. The cost of building chargers that can deliver that amount of power is prohibitive. Looking beyond charging, Ample sees opportunities in the grid power market as well, the two founders said. As we scale up this year we will. Currently the company is operating at a storage capacity of tens of megawatts per hour, according to Hassounah.

We can finance the batteries in multiple ways as well as utilize other sources of financing. Ample co-founders John de Souza and Khaled Hassounah. Image Credit: Ample. To make refueling convenient, Better Place invented automated battery-switching stations; they deploy robots that slide under the car, remove a depleted battery, and replace it with a fully charged one in about five minutes.

These battery-swapping stations work faster than chargers; the company has built 37 of them across Israel. By retaining ownership of the battery, Better Place is able to reduce the sticker price of the car, and upgrade the battery as the technology improves. Like wireless phone companies that discount their hardware and make the money back by selling minutes, Better Place reduces the price of the car and charges its owners a monthly fee for the battery and electricity, based on how many miles they travel.

In fact, leasing a Better Place car in Israel costs about 20 percent less than a Toyota Prius or Honda Insight hybrid, the company says. In his heyday, Agassi liked to tell people that Better Place would eventually be able to give cars away, and still turn a profit.

But such rosy projections never came close to materializing. Local authorities, whose permission was needed to build battery-switching stations, put up unexpected roadblocks, slowing progress, company officials said. Another shortcoming: Better Place assumed that other automakers would build vehicles that are compatible with its battery-swapping technology, but so far only Renault has done so.

Marketing has been another challenge: The company is asking its customers not only to embrace a new technology, but an unfamiliar business model that is hard to explain. He said battery swapping might make sense for taxis or fleets, but not on a broad scale.

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