WIRED: Inspiring article on all electric cars

Quite a long article in the September issue of WIRED; well worth the read. I have the magazine version and read it twice- I was so encouraged by it.

http://www.wired.com/cars/futuretransport/magazine/16-09/ff_agassi?currentPage=all

Excerpt:
Agassi dealt with the battery issue by simply swatting it away. Previous approaches relied on a traditional manufacturing formula: We make the cars, you buy them. Agassi reimagined the entire automotive ecosystem by proposing a new concept he called the Electric Recharge Grid Operator. It was an unorthodox mashup of the automotive and mobile phone industries. Instead of gas stations on every corner, the ERGO would blanket a country with a network of "smart" charge spots. Drivers could plug in anywhere, anytime, and would subscribe to a specific plan—unlimited miles, a maximum number of miles each month, or pay as you go—all for less than the equivalent cost for gas. They'd buy their car from the operator, who would offer steep discounts, perhaps even give the cars away. The profit would come from selling electricity—the minutes.

There would be plugs in homes, offices, shopping malls. And when customers couldn't wait to "fill up," they'd go to battery exchange stations where they would pull into car-wash-like sheds, and in a few minutes, a hydraulic lift would swap the depleted battery with a fresh one. Drivers wouldn't pay a penny extra: The ERGO would own the battery.
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By early summer 2008, Agassi had two countries ready to roll out the plan, a major automaker producing the cars, and $200 million in committed capital. He had launched the fifth-largest startup of all time in less than a year.




Interesting though that we don't hear too much about this in the USA.

We need these optimistic articles posted. :)

:kick:

Although I must admit I hadn't come up with the "sell the electricity like minutes" idea just yet.

Godfrey Daniels!

Actually, I think this is the key to the whole thing, that and selling power by the minute.

People can start calling their reps demanding electric cars that are cheaper to run than gas, and when the swelling call is big enough, Obama can pick up with the change thing and run to the touchdown!

Oil is death, and it can't be denied any longer.

Despite the examples across Europe and just across the border in Canada, we're bombarded with "It won't work (here)", "It's too expensive", "It's no good", "Treatment will be substandard" and other outright lies.

If any of these things were true, we wouldn't be paying more per capita on health care than every other developed nation while still leaving 20% of our population uninsured. Maintaining the corporate for-profit system across the U.S. is worth hundreds of billions of dollars each year to the insurance, drug, mega-chain hospitals and other health-care related corporations, therefore it's worth spending several hundred million a year buying politicians, MSM pundits, advertising space and everything else they do to protect their profit.

So they tell us the battery technology "isn't there yet", the cars will be too expensive/are too difficult to engineer, won't be safe and will stress the grid to the breaking point. Anyone who watched and understood "Who Killed the Electric Car" knows how lame these arguments are and I'm not going to enumerate them again.

However, I would like to point out that it takes roughly the same amount of energy to refine a gallon of gasoline as it does to charge an electric car to drive the same distance as that gallon of gas. It really is that much more efficient.