危 wēi  danger

The uptake of electric vehicles has been slower than most predicted, even though many governments have offered tax incentives to purchasers and fuel prices remain high.  The battery technology is often cited as the aspect that has under-delivered – even the new generation Li-ion cells take a long time to charge, are expensive ($10k-$20k for an average electric car) and are difficult to dispose of.

机 jī opportunity

Californian firm Better Place, founded by Shai Agassi, has defined an innovative approach to turn this barrier to adoption into a competitive advantage.  Better Place is identifying ‘islands’ (areas with low car mobility across their borders) and building networks of charging and battery swapping stations.  Electric vehicle owners will be able to drive their cars into a station and have their batteries exchanged automatically for a fully charged set in a matter of seconds.  Better Place also aims to own the batteries and begin charging vehicle owners per mile driven – this might increase the rate of adoption of electric cars by decoupling the cost of batteries from the initial purchase.  Israel is already signed up and the firm is in discussions with 25 other potential ‘islands’.

how about…

• identifying the barriers to adoption for industries and designing business models to overcome them
• pricing based on usage rather than fixed fee