About a week ago Brad Plumer, working over at Ezra Klein's Wonkblog, wrote a brief post about America’s failure thus far to purchase a lot of electric cars. I found the post a bit strange because Plumer identified two real problems that today’s electric cars and hybrids have – (i) they are fairly expensive, and (ii) fully electric cars have only a limited range (about 65 miles) before they need to be recharged – but seemed determined to ignore both these real concerns. Instead, he ascribed our reluctance to purchase small, expensive cars that cannot travel very far to a quirk in American “psychology.” Indeed, the title of his post asked and then answered its own question: “What’s wrong with the electric car? Psychology, perhaps.”
Maybe he just wanted a chance to work in a particular quote from an executive who told him that, “Our research shows that people want to feel like they can get into their car and drive across the country at if [sic] they have to. It might sound silly, but it’s real.”
(No, I don’t know why that sounds silly. I have frequently driven across state lines in my car, and if I were to purchase a new car I’m pretty sure I’d want that one also to be able to drive me as far as I wanted to go. At the very least it should get me to my sister’s house for Christmas, and she lives 200 miles away.)
But the reason I wanted to discuss Plumer’s post is because he also mentions Better Place, an American-Israeli venture company that is attempting to develop what I consider to be the only viable infrastructure needed to support an electric car economy: a nationwide network of battery-switching stations. Better Place is currently installing fully automatic battery-switching networks in Denmark and Israel, comprised of stations that supposedly can swap out a depleted car battery for a fully charged one in less than five minutes – easily comparable to the time one spends filling the tank at a conventional service station.
I like this idea for a couple of reasons.
