Better Place Means A Better Place
Every once in a while, you come across one of those companies that seems to transcend the establishment, break the rules, and think outside the box in a way that is so crazy, it just might work.
Introducing Better Place, a company based in Palo Alto, CA, intent on revolutionizing and modernizing our entire paradigm for transportation.
In a nutshell, Better Place aims to bring the world, particularly Western industrialized nations to a full integration with electric automobiles. However, the business model for carrying this out is what makes this company unique. Essentially, the model is the model for cell phones. Just as you pay cell phones by the minute, you pay Better Place for miles. Just as you connect your cell phone to cell towers, you connect your car to battery recharge stations. And just as you are in a cellular network, you are in a recharge grid.
Better Place claims that automobiles would become extremely affordable if not free because automakers would pursue contracts with electrical companies and the only cost to the consumer would be subscribing to a grid or multiple grids and then paying for miles.
Better Place is in discussions with several nations, already has the support from Israel and Denmark, and already has a contract with Renault-Nissan. They even caused Deutsche Bank to claim that they might cause a “massive disruption” in the auto industry.
Deutsche Bank calls their idea something that will cause “massive disruption.” That’s how you know it’s good?
I’d be curious to dig into this more sometime, but it sounds pretty goofy at first read.
Go Denmark! They would do something as socialist as this.
I suppose something like this could work in the Statists nations of Scandinavia, some of the smaller EU countries, and maybe even some Western cities; but large-scale implementation seems like a “massive disruption.”
Hehe. The word massive always makes me laugh, massively.
Sign me up. I imagine this is something that would, like cell phones, start in metropolis areas and slowly creep outwards.
There are some fairly successful car share companies like Philly Car Share that have made strides toward making individual car ownership obsolete.
They can make anything work in Denmark or Finland. They could tax people at 90% and they would still somehow end up being in the top ten on per capita GDP.
Sorry, I think I wrote the last sentence poorly. Deutsche Bank meant that term in a good way.
I updated it with the article that I got the quote from. My apologies for leaving that out.
That probably should of been translated differently, methinks.
We’re coming up on 40,000 hits since March! We should break that mark sometime tomorrow.
I am a alternative transportation junky as well. Nice article Chris.