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Electric Car Startup 'Better Place' Liquidating After $850 Million Investment
awaissoft writes "Better Place hoped to transform the energy industry with electric cars and battery switching stations. Better Place wanted to make the world a better place by replacing gas stations with battery switching stations that would remove the driving mileage limitations from electric cars and eventually rid the world of fossil-fuel burning vehicles. But after six years and burning through $850 million, the company is filing for liquidation in an Israeli court. As reported by the Associated Press, Better Place's Board of Directors issued a written statement Sunday announcing that the company was winding down."
Since Elon has said that the Model S ( and presumably the Model X) is capable of conversion to battery swap, perhaps Tesla will try to get the Better Place switch station tech - despite the company's failure, they did have solid working tech as Tesla could benefit tremendously by not having to reinvent, er, the wheel.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
Without a significant existing electric car userbase, the only real way to make money on this would be to get a manufacturer to buy in. But the only manufacturer that seems willing to spend much money on any kind of quick-charge network is Tesla, and they chose an alternate solution.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
It's definitely gone to a better place now.
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So Better Place is liquidating while Tesla is turning a profit. This shows that they were focusing on the wrong problem. Instead of creating a new infrastructure specifically for electric cars (all of which would have to standardize on battery packs, limiting design and innovation in an emerging technology), Tesla simply made sure they could be efficient enough and pack enough batteries in for about 300 miles. Tesla also figured out relatively fast charging (slower than filling up with gas, but not horrible), and is putting charging stations in major highway corridors. If the cars become popular enough, we will eventually see charging stations all over the place.
I think people are a lot less nervous about finding an electrical outlet to charge from than they are about finding a battery swapping station.
You mean the lack of customers is a hindrance to business? You mean to tell me that businesses don't exist to make the world a better place by trying to force a product into a niche that isn't exactly there yet?
Huh. I could have sworn this was going to work. I mean, there's absolutely no profit in fossil fuels, right?
It's not about being "old fashioned" either. It's about what works. Electric doesn't work for the vast majority of the world - yet. The business there right now is either niche ultra-high-end, or utility - both of which require a large up-front investment that you're only going to find in certain places. There's a growing niche for big-city transport, but that requires investments that many municipalities aren't willing to make just yet.
There are also a lot of problems that electric doesn't solve, like the big-haul transportation industry. Sure, you could offload that work to a national rail network, but then you run into the problem of overloaded rail traffic. In America, that's a bigger problem than you would actually imagine. (eg: it's becomming
Electric cars might be coming for the masses, but these guys were way ahead of the curve. A successful business launches right before the peak of the curve - and we're nowhere near there yet for electric cars.
So then, I'm not surprised. Sad that it didn't work out for them, but, really, did you expect anything else?
i'm sure they're going to a Better Place
It's been said elsewhere that every electric car manufacturer has its own solution for the core technologies of batteries and charging.
There is only one car that you can re-charge at Better Place.
The wholly automated Better Place station costs around $500,000. That's not easy to recover when in all of Israel there were only about 700 of these cars on the roads.
What he actually said was "The investor money has gone to a better place.... our pockets. You're all fired and we're bankrupt. See ya, bitches."
I am missing something here – where in that paragraph does it talk about tax breaks?
We'll see when Telsa (or anyone else) can beat Better Place's distance record of 1172 miles in 24 hours. When Telsa figures out another way to push 22KW into a car in 3 minutes without causing a huge explosion and fire, than we'll have a better idea. Until then, Better Place's technology was the most practical form of electric transport using existing technology. It was a good idea but like many good ideas, it needs to wait until society is ready for it and entrepreneurs know how to sell it. This is by no means the first time we've seen technological regression. The rechargeable battery electric car was invented by French physicist Gaston Planté in 1856. In 1878, a Methodist minister named John Wesley Carhart proved that a steam-powered car he named the “Spark” could travel long distances under its own power. But when it frightened a valuable horse belonging to industrialist J.I. Case (tractor company owner) to death, it was banished from the city and the world would have to wait until 1886 when Karl Benz and then later Henry Ford would bring back an idea whose time had finally come.
Similar examples of technological regressions and reinventions can be found in the history of electric lighting. Better Place had a better idea for electric car charging, and if we can learn anything from history– most good ideas eventually see the light of day.
Thats a lot of dollars to burn. What did they spend it on? Thats way more then Tesla spent to get their car into production.
"Better Place" was using proprietary charging outlets with smartcard-style protection, and pushed for a law prohibiting competitors from using their outlet infrastructure.
From the start it sounded like a nightmare case of vendor-lock-in. As an Israeli consumer - I say good riddance.
Open infrastructure, ability to charge the car from electrical outlet in your driveway, and laws permitting car conversion to electricity is the fertile ground needed to make EVs thrive.
To demonstrate the point let's compare e-bicycle/e-scooter market vs. e-mopeds. E-bike or e-scooter costs from 1K to 2.5k USD in Israel, and market is thriving.
Gasoline powered bikes and mopeds are extremely popular, especially in large cities. As a contrast due to laws, regulations and insane insurance costs - you have to search long and hard to find an e-moped on the street.
"...a former top executive at software maker SAP..."
I really think this says it all: it would be like having an IBM exec trying to run Google when it was a startup--you don't put curmugeons in charge of something this new (IMHO).
The problem was the CEO, Shai Agassi. I heard him speak at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco once. He came across as a con man. He's good looking, a good speaker, and talks total bullshit. He was talking about expanding his company by a factor of 10 every year. Nobody does that in a business which requires substantial real-world infrastructure or a large number of employees. This was after five years in which the most his company had actually accomplished was a 3-taxi demo in Tokyo that only ran for three months.
Battery swapping was never a good idea to begin with. It was a bet against improved battery technology - a bet which required a huge infrastructure to make work at all. A full-scale battery swap system would require as many battery swap stations as gas stations. Each would be big, more like a car wash than a pump island.
The battery swap stations Better Place built in Israel are single-lane stations that require about five minutes for a battery swap. So they correspond to a one-pump gas station, but cost much more.
While I think they were right to agressively build the infrastructure of charge points and switch stations and did a lot of great work with the swap stations, communications network and publicity, I think they focused far too much on the end-user market, even in Israel.
I'm going to make some assumptions which may be wrong but, in Agassi's place, I would have gone after the utilities more - build the switch stations fairly early on and use them to support energy generation, wind & solar farms, peak-shaving, whatever, for a price.
It's hard to say if it would have been profitable but it would have been bringing in some cash on a regular basis and might have alleviated nervousness in the investors.
The next failing was having only one (battery switch) vehicle and that being a passenger car - a light truck and / or delivery van ( like Brightsource's effort ) should also have been added which brings us to failure #3 - not chasing company fleets and taxis.
There are lots of crowded big cities with crappy air and people and goods on the move. Delivery vans may run all day but most don't go very far from where they park, much like most taxis.
If the effort had been focused on a handful of large cities with the intent of replacing 5% of their ICE taxis and delivery vans, it would have been money better spent and the company might still be afloat.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
Technology, as much as we think when it's disruptive and ground breaking is rarely ever revolutionary. It's not like everyone started to use Windows instead of DOS, or that in one fell swoop the mobile market switched from dumb phones to smart phones overnight.
In that sense, Better Place seemed indeed to have focused on the wrong problem. Yes, electric charging stations are far and in between. Right now. But unlike gas pumps, practically every residential unit and business location can have one. So, for now, your Tesla has an effective drive radius of, what, 150 miles? That's good enough for most daily commutes. Maybe not if you're a salesman, but I think Tesla has envisioned this. They're not catering for the entire car market; after all, the car is not really a good deal for Joe Average who has to live on $50,000 and bring two kids to college on that either.
There is the uncertainty of electric cars becoming a success, but given the development of fuel prices and M&R that is much higher with gasoline engines (all those moving parts) it surely is attractive. So let's assume Tesla sells well. What will happen? The $100,000 price point will ensure that certain business will scramble to get charge stations. Four and five star hotels and restaurants for instance. Where will Mr. Executive stay overnight? Why, where he can charge his Tesla, of course!
Movie theaters, malls... any place where it's likely you're going to stay for a prolonged time will offer charging. Once the market of charging station installing businesses has risen, why not coffee and fast food? One thing that everyone seems to forget in the discussion—you don't need to charge the battery all the way up in most cases. You need to make it home—or at worst to the next charging station. That can bring down the charging time needed considerable. If as a business it will lure in five or ten customers every afternoon the decision to get a charging station might be an easy one.
Better Place is opposite: the process seems cumbersome, and as shown in the video more akin to going through a carwash than getting a tank full of gas. Here's why I don't go through the car wash on a daily basis: it takes too much time and I can't do another thing. On the other hand, getting a short charge-up for the batteries while getting breakfast, or stopping for a drink on the way home—perfectly acceptable to me.
For the gentleman who drives 800 miles per day: if you make ten stops, you only have to "charge 80 miles" on each stop on average. And if you only make three stops, I'm sure that those are not five minute ones. Once charging stations are everywhere, doing 800 miles visiting customers shouldn't be a problem anymore.
EV batteries are big, but adding swap capability only adds minor additional space.. The Model S pack is swappable. The problem is standardization. Better Place burned through all that money for only one battery design that only one car adopted, and even then the Renault Fluence had to have its trunk extended to make the Z.E. version fit BP's QuickDrop pack. BP hoped that customers would demand swap capability so other car companies would adopt it, but it didn't happen, and car manufactures have instead adopted many different chemistries, layouts, placement within the car, air vs. water cooling...
EV batteries are built up from multiple slabs or sheets. Already if your battery breaks, you only replace the defective module. You could imagine swapping the individual modules for charged ones, but each still weighs around 40 pounds and has be reattached to high-voltage high-current wiring and the cooling system. It's an order of magnitude harder than prying out 8 D cells from your boombox, and again there's no "D cell" standard for EVs.
Maybe there could be a standard for a battery extender, a cage in the trunk where you can add several of these modules to your city EV for a long trip. That avoids the problem of swapping your $12,000 pristine battery for a clapped-out beater. But all the cost-time-weight-safety-standardization tradeoffs work against it. Skip the hassle and rent a long-range car for those trips, or use the other car that's already in the garage of most American households.
=S
I'd love a full-electric car, with about 50-80 mile range, which could tow a trailer or hook up a hitch mounted rack with a generator in/on it for longer trips. Drive it to work/shopping on a daily basis, rent the gen-trailer when going on a ling trip.
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