The less rosy aspects of Shai Agassi's electric car
Price of cars and safety of battery replacement stations unclear; electromagnetic fields in cars may cause cancer.
By Yuval Azoulay Tags: Israel newsAmid Sunday's fanfare as Better Place rolled out its electric car technology in north Tel Aviv, the company was also throwing up smokescreens to avoid dealing with the less rosy aspects of Shai Agassi's dream of clean, silent cars plying Israel's roads.
Employees of Better Place and of the Renault car fitted with batteries explicitly forbid us to look under the hood or in the trunk. Secrecy is important when it comes to nascent technology, they explained, and before it can be fully revealed there are still a few international patent forms to fill out.
The issue of price is also cloaked in fog: According to Better Place Chief Technology Officer Barak Hershkovitz, "At the end of the day the costs will be similar to that of a gasoline-powered car, or less." Significantly reducing the cost to consumers, he said, is the fact that Better Place will pick up the tab for the lithium batteries - estimated to cost about $10,000 - as part of the customer service plan.
The company says that around 500,000 charging stations will be installed throughout Israel: near subscribers' homes, in public parking lots and garages, and at curbside parking along city streets. There will be around 100 battery-swap stations as well, where a depleted battery can be switched for a fully charged one in about three minutes - less time than it takes to fill the empty tank of a gasoline-powered car. The maximum range of a fully charged battery is 160 kilometers, a figure expected to decline in certain conditions, including higher-than-average driving speeds, passenger or cargo loads, use of air conditioning or travel in hilly areas.
There have also been reports of studies indicating that electromagnetic fields in electric cars could cause cancer. "Renault, which makes this car, is a serious company and it will meet all radiation regulations. I am sure that the finished product will be well below the maximum," Hershkovitz said.
Thomas Weber, Mercedes' director of group research and car development, told TheMarker in an interview last year that the battery replacement stations could pose safety hazards, exposing drivers to high voltage and a risk of electrocution, explosions or fire. Better Place refutes these claims. Company officials say their cars will be safe to use, that rainwater will not have a deleterious effect despite the vehicle being electric and that a trial conducted in Denmark proved that the exposed charging stations installed along curbside parking worked fine even when covered with snow.
An argument remains over the true environmental contribution electricity-powered vehicles make: While a report written for Better Place by air-quality expert Bernanda Flicstein unequivocally determined that the use of electric cars will reduce air pollution, Dan Rabinowitz, an environmental expert at Tel Aviv University, contends that air pollution and the emission of "greenhouse gases" will continue because of the need to generate additional electricity in order to charge the batteries.
All this is in stark contrast to the happy vision documented in the film screened Sunday at the Better Place visitors' center, which ironically is located inside one of the two oil tankers that remained on site after the Pi Glilot oil tank farm was demolished - destroying with it terrorists' plans to blow the area surrounding the major intersection to, shall we say, a better place?
A screening room was built inside the tanks, with seats taken from old-school gasoline-powered cars. "We're addicted to gasoline," giant letters above the screen declared, while on two other screens Agassi himself promised that in the era of electric cars the air of Jerusalem will indeed be as pure as wine, as promised by Naomi Shemer in the song "Yerushalayim shel Zahav" ("Jerusalem of Gold").
The brains behind this ambitious program are those of a physician, Hershkovitz, who went straight into high-tech after earning his medical degree and met Agassi at the software firm SAP.
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My favorite part of this article is how sharp the readers/commentors are... well done indeed... Azoulay seems tired and obsolete.
What's wrong with the arithmetic? a charge spot is a combination of an electric outlet and an internet access. Hw many of those are in Israel? If 70 percent of the households are internet connected then at least a million. To say naught of electric outlets. BP puts in the contract 2 charge spots for every car sold or leased. They contracted for 45 thousand cars in 2011. Ergo close to 100,000 spots right off the bat!! 100 swap stations at 500K dollars is 50 million, a mere 3 percent of their available financing, pre IPO!! So let optimism reign, and the oil age is passe'
After seeing the headline I figured that somebody had come up with some critical faults in Agassi's plan but the content of the article made me think that the writer was having a "slow news day".
my condolences to mr azoulay for his pessimism. may he be pleasantly surprised when things work out well with the electric car. how sad to live with an outlook like his. refuah shlaima.
The number is not an exaggeration: a charging station is just a little outlet to plug in the car to recharge. It is smaller than a parking meter. They will be installed next to parking spaces and even next to owners' home parking spots.
The title sounds like they found a catch in the "Better Place" idea. If the biggest problems of "Better Place" are car radiation and safety of the stations - they are doomed to a huge success. The "coal burning" pollition problem is also not a problem at all - it's much easier to install 1 big cleaning system on the coal power plant that to install millions small cleaning systems (1 for every car). The real problems of "Better Place" are around car cost and installing and running thousands of charging stations. I do hope they will overcome both.
" this experiment in Israel should be successful, if they ignore idiot nay-sayers." Sure. The smart yes-sayers came up, so far, with over a billion dollars. They may even buy an electric yacht and wander in places which also want to switch to electric cars...
Petrol stations are also dangerous with fire's in the beginning it was much more dangerous than the charging point for a electric car. Are benzine damps and polution from a petrol car not bad for you're health??? It is important to look to the fact...would be a real shame that this car would not make it because of wrong use of facts. Mercedes ofcourse wants to damage this project because their not involved. The world less depending on oil would make the world a saver place to live ;-) Less money for dangerous regimes to buy or develop weapons.
Colin - other recent news items wrote about the large gas field discoveries off the coast, which is much lower polluting then coal. Why on earth should there need to be a govt tender for this type of project?
Dear Bill, I hope you are right. Please elaborate for those of us who also know very little about physics and radiation.
So hopefully the company will prove all the skeptics wrong. Can't wait to find out how the pilot tests go.
Israel currently still uses coal to generate electricity, the worst fuel pollutor around. They'll have to generate more and burn more coal. Just say the project is a success, does the Israel Electric company have plans to build more infrastructure to cope with the demand and who will fit the bill, Agassi's company? The answer is no to all! I see Renault not trying it out in France. Better a small country where any fiasco can be more easily hidden. This project was approved by the government of Israel without a tender and an environmental impact statement.
Electric cars are nothing new. Electric cars with litium batteries have been successfully running in Europe & the U.S. for several years. There have been no electrocution hazards or increased cancer risk from electromagnetic fields which already exist everywhere from power lines, cell phones and communication towers. The charging stations could be solar-powered or come from power plants fueled by natural gas which is much cleaner than the exhaust coming from petrol cars. The one thing that has prevented electric cars from used by many people is the lack of an infrastructure of charging stations. This is why this experiment in Israel should be successful, if they ignore idiot nay-sayers.
The whole issue is over hyped. There is technology available today that enables cars to travel 400km on one charge. In addition you can charge the cars overnight at home. who needs charge stations? 99% of people travel less than 400km per day.
"500,000 charging stations", the article claims. That's about four charging stations for each apartment block in Israel. Maybe Haaretz should check that all its staff are safely through 3rd grade arithmetic before giving them work.
It was so, so easy to predict! No problem: now we are over a billion dollar deficit
Yes, Bash the only company that has the possibility to enable mass production of zero emmision vejicles. Yes, Better Places' cars WILL be zero emition, they will be using soley electricity from renewables, wind for Denmark and solar for Israel. Thank You Bettr Place for your persistance in the face of skeptics. Thus far, you have time and time again proven the skeptics wrong. Go Better Place!
The criticism was interesting until I got to that part where it mentions radiation.It is clear to me that the author of this article knows very little about technology and less about physics. This makes me think that this article is based more on hearsay and rumor than fact.