A Smart Car Dream in Israel—Not So Smart, After All?
How Better Place’s Electric Car Vision for Israel Went Off Track
As promised, the landscape of Israel is dotted with battery-switching stations, 27 blue-and-white buildings bearing the logo of Better Place, the most ambitious electric car enterprise in the world. The batteries are right there too, rows of lithium-ion blocks that can be lifted in and out of the rear of a four-door Renault Fluence in a bit more than the time it takes to fill up at the pump.
The only thing that’s missing is the cars — or, rather, the people who want to drive them.
In six months, Better Place has sold only 500 cars in Israel, the country that was supposed to showcase the vision of its founder, Shai Agassi, who predicted 100,000 totally electric vehicles would be on the road by 2016, sticking it to the petroleum industry and the despots it funds. Instead, Agassi is gone, forced out as CEO last month because of mounting losses seated in the hesitancy of Israeli consumers to commit.
“If it were popular, I might,” says Moshe Kretzo, 60, when asked if he would buy a Better Place car. The airline employee already owns a Honda Civic and a Hyundai SUV but was not about to take the plunge on the all-electric car, which can be re-charged when parked, or have its exhausted battery swapped for a fresh one at the company’s charging stations, toward which the dashboard computer kindly directs you. “I’ll let the other people try it,” Kretzo says. “I don’t want to be the sucker, the freier.” Another translation for the Yiddish word, known to every Jewish Israeli, is “chump.”
Israelis’ skeptical attitude about the paradigm-changing car muddies the question of exactly what’s going wrong with Better Place. Clearly Aggasi, a native of Israel who found early success in Silicon Valley, made maximalist promises. Agassi not only promised 4,000 cars would be on the road in Israel this year, and 64,000 in 2015, he predicted the electric car would surpass gas-powered vehicles by 2020, shifting $10 trillion from one industry to another in the course of a decade. On the spectrum running from enthusiastic marketing to starry-eyed prophecy, Aggasi could go from zero to 60 in four-point-three seconds.