Automotive Blog

Listening to car ads on the radio these days almost makes me feel sympathetic for the salesmen. They’re literally begging people to buy SUVs that have been sitting on the lot for months. But honestly, with the national per gallon price of gasoline hovering at $4, who they heck is going to buy a land yacht? Of course this is all excellent news for alternative fuels and auto tech of any flavor except petroleum is fairly busting out of the woodwork right now.

Earlier this month Project Better Place demonstrated an electric car in Israel that developers said they hoped would “revolutionize transportation in the country and serve as a pilot for the rest of the world” according to the Associated Press Report on Haaretz.com. The Renault sedan-like prototype comes from Project Better Place, a Silicon Valley entity that hopes to see its car on the streets of Israel by 2010. (The project received the endorsement of the Israeli government in January and a Danish energy company is also a partner.)

All the traditional concerns associated with an electric vehicle have been raised — battery power, range, et al — but several hundred of the vehicles will be driven in a pilot project in 2009 and everything seems on course for significant numbers of the cars to arrive in the country the following year. The entrepreneur behind it all is an Israeli-American, Shai Agassi, who scraped up $200 million to get the whole thing up and running (and negotiated tax incentives from the government to boost the car’s marketability to consumers.)

The project in a relatively small and extremely well-organized country like Israeli (political discord with the neighbors notwithstanding), could serve as a model for other nations to get behind alternative fuel projects in a similar fashion. Definitely need to put this one on the list of alternative fuel developments to watch.

Posted on May 28th, 2008 by Shorty
Filed under: alternative fuels |

del.icio.us Digg Reddit Google Netscape StumbleUpon