A couple of days after the work trip to Indiana, I found out I'd be heading to Albany in upstate New York to the client's research headquarters for an event about batteries. Yes, batteries. So hot! Myself and a couple of coworkers flew out on Tuesday afternoon and we got back Friday morning. The photo above is the desk of Thomas Edison, which they keep in the lobby of the research center in front of a huge and hideous potted plant.
The battery event actually turned out to be interesting. A speaker from a company called Better Place really blew my mind. I had no idea fully electric cars were already on the streets in Israel and Denmark! People pay month-by-month for access to "battery stations" where they can swap out for a fresh battery. Apparently it works in a similar way to how yearly mobile phone plans work.
The cool thing is that just this week, Better Place announced it's signed up Australia, which will make it the third country in the world to have an electric car network. It should be running by 2012 and link up Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane with more than 250,000 charging stations. Awesome.
Of course there are some people out there poking holes in the idea, but overall, most people believe it's a big step in the right direction. The model probably wouldn't translate to every American city, but certainly in denser cities like NYC and Chicago where car share companies like Zipcar (which is in over 20 cities) and i-Go (which is non-profit and Chicago based) are popular, I think it could work.
If you wanna read more about Better Place, here's an article from the August issue of Wired.
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