Today I want to introduce to you a brilliant young Israeli and his electric car project called Better Place .
Shai Agasi was born in Ramt Gan in 1968. He is an Israeli High tech and businessman. He served at the management of SAP the German software giant and was candidate to be the chairman.
In January 2007 at Davos convention (annual convention held every January where businessmen and politicians from all the world meet and discuss global issues) he met Shimon Peres the president of Israel. They discussed about the global warming.
Shai said that he have ideas how to solve the problem. So Mr. Peres asked him what is so important in his current job that is preventing him from trying to solve such an important global issue and he promised to help.
After a few days Shai decided to leave SAP and start the project called Better Place.
He found investors in this project and started to run the project.
The project
The target of the project is to begin a mass deployment of electric cars.
Better Place company will deploy 5000 charching points all over the state of Israel.
Since charging the car batteries takes a few hours it will be possible to just replace the empty batteries with charged ones.
Renault-Nissan is the first automaker, to announce their partnerships with Better Place to begin a mass deployment of electric cars.
The State of Israel will reduce the taxes on electric cars until 2020.
So Israel will be the first country to use electric cars in a grand scale.
I hope this project will be a big success and more projects like this will follow.
Just imagine how this project can change the city centers.
There wiil be no air pollution so we wiil be able to breath clean air in city centers.
Electric cars are very quiet, so can you imagine being in a city center without all the engines noise. It can change the urban experience completely, and I didn’t mention the effect on the global warming.
Of course this project should be followed with producing electricity without pollution like sun and wind.
At end I want to mention the Green City project of Abu Dhabi which I hope will be a big success.
Estelle O'Brien, 3 months ago
Wow this sounds like such a great idea. I hope it takes off and Israel leads the way for the rest of the world, just as she does in so many other things.
Eyal Nahmias, 3 months ago
I was having a B.B.Q with 2 other couples on Saturday, and we all discussed this issue. I think it is an amazing initiative that will benefit Israel, the middle east and even globally in terms of CO2 emission reduction, cleaner and greener world and better transportation. I do believe that there will be only 50000 charging points and station and not 500000 as you stated. I cross my fingers that this venture will succeed. Thanks for sharing this image with the Art of the Middle East group.