better

To get more electric vehicles on the road, consumers should have the option to essentially lease the batteries, a University of California at Berkeley study argues.

The UC Berkeley Center for Entrepreneurship & Technology on Monday released an analysis that found that there are environmental and economic benefits to adopting electric vehicles, but the high cost of batteries is a persistent problem that remains a barrier to buyers.

The study's author, economist Thomas Becker, argues that pay-per-mile service contracts--the rough equivalent of buying a service contract with a cell phone--and swappable batteries will hasten adoption rates. Separating the cost … Read more

YOKOHAMA, Japan--As the mock-up electric Nissan Dualis crossover halts over the service bay, two robotic shuttles immediately start scurrying below.

One latches onto the underside of the Dualis, swiftly pulling out a spent battery pack. The other then lifts a fully charged pack into place. A green light, and away the driver goes. All in under a minute.

Welcome to the future of electric vehicles, as seen by Better Place. The Palo Alto, Calif., company aims to build an international network of battery-swap stations for electric vehicles.

The battery swap system, which made its global debut in concept form here, … Read more

An electric Ford is coming, but at what price? Two tricks that will make an Audi use less gas. We also tell you what 12 percent of new cars will have next year. Plus, ride in a car with the wrong name on the badge!

• CNET drives the Audi A6 3.0T Sedan

• Ford admits electric Focus will have limited appeal

• Watch automatic battery changing station in action

• OnStar uses Microsoft Virtual Earth to find where you crashed

• Comparison: Gas engine vs. Diesel (from TruckTrend.com)

Better Place on Tuesday showed off an automated electric vehicle battery-swapping station which takes about one minute to slip in a fresh battery.

The station in Yokohama, Japan is part of a government-sponsored test around electric vehicles. The vehicles being tested are modified Nissan SUVs that run entirely on batteries.

The switching stations use robotic battery "shuttles" on a track system that remove a depleted battery for recharging and insert a fresh battery.

As the batteries are on the bottom of the car, a driver goes up a ramp and stays in the car during the battery exchange. … Read more

Shai Agassi is famously persuasive. With just an idea, he was able to raise $300 million to launch Better Place, a venture that plans to build electric car charging spots and battery switching stations in Israel, Denmark, San Francisco, and many other places.

He was able to convince Carlos Ghosn, the CEO of Renault-Nissan to build electric sedans with a battery pack that can be swapped out at Better Place's robot-assisted stations.

People in the auto industry seemed intrigued with Better Place's business model, where the company owns the batteries and the consumer buys a monthly contract to charge their cars.

But apart from Renault Nissan, no other automakers have signed on with Better Place. And industry executives have voiced skepticism on various aspects of Better Place's ambitious plan: Can one company build an electric vehicle charging infrastructure and operate it profitably? On a technical level, can battery packs be standardized in size for automated battery changing?

Said another way, nobody doubts that Agassi is a visionary with good intentions--to reduce the world's dependence on oil to help preserve the planet. People just wonder if he can make a business of it.

Next month, Better Place will show off a key piece of its technology in Yokohama, Japan: an automated system to switch out batteries. Cars drive up a ramp and a robot quickly removes a battery pack and puts a fresh one in.

During a talk at the Fortune Brainstorm Green conference on Tuesday, Agassi said that the company plans to test its technology components this year, test its charging networks next year, and then have "mass market" roll-out in 2011.

After his presentation, I sat down with Agassi, an Israel-born former SAP software executive, to get a better idea of where Better Place is going.

Question: This is a hugely ambitious project. Do you ever doubt that you're taking on too much? Agassi: Not at all. Look, engineering is a very interesting discipline. You get into a room, you design, design, design. You write a bunch of white papers and you build a prototype. If you've built a prototype, the next question is can you build at scale and will it last?

… Read more

Correction: Contributing editor Lowell Heddings compiled the scripts for Lifehacker, not Better Gmail for Firefox compiler Gina Trapani.

If you're the antsy type, you can grab the "Chromed" version of the popular Firefox extension Better Gmail right here, right now. However, you'll need a little patience to install it: this is a collection of the raw Greasemonkey scripts, and it will require some fiddling before you can get them to work in Chrome.

First off, you'll need at least the most recent beta release of Google's browser, which supports scripts. If you don't … Read more

Supr Flickr is a new Firefox extension that's a hodgepodge of small changes that make the site better suited for power users. I like it because it quietly brings many of Flickr's deeper features front and center, keeping you from having to dig around too much to get at them. Things like viewing multiple sizes of a shot, remembering formatting tags when writing descriptions and replying to comments, and grabbing a photo's source link are all made simpler.

Among its handier features, the add-on includes quick links to the third-party Hivemind search engine, which offers search filters … Read more

This interview was originally posted at CNET Australia. We have reposted it because the U.S. faces similar challenges to Australia in adopting electric-vehicle technology.

q&a We sat down with the CEO of Better Place Australia, Evan Thornley, to discuss how his company plans to make the electric car a reality in Australia.

Last year we reported on Better Place's deals with various national and state governments, such as Israel, Denmark, Hawaii, and California, to roll out infrastructure to assist in the adoption of electric vehicles (EV) from about 2011 onwards. This infrastructure will primarily consist of battery exchange stations, where drivers of Better Place compatible EVs can have their nearly depleted battery pack swapped out for a fully charged set, and EV charging points, located in homes as well as public places.

At the end of January, Evan Thornley was appointed as CEO of Better Place's Australian operations. Thornley was a founder of LookSmart and recently quit his seat in the Victorian State Parliament on the eve of his elevation to the ministry, raising the ire of the state's Liberal opposition. He and Guy Pross, the company's director of government affairs, sat down for a chat with CNET Australia about how Better Place plans to convert Australia's car fleet to electric vehicles.

CNET Australia: So why was Australia chosen?

Evan Thornley: Well, we think that this system works best for high-kilometer drivers. So the best way to prove that was to target a country which has plenty of those.

Could you please elaborate on how your system "works best for high-kilometer drivers?"

ET: Once the recharging infrastructure exists and the battery's sitting in the car, then, if you pay full commercial price for renewable energy, the energy costs of driving one kilometer down the road in an EV is about 1/7th the cost of driving that same kilometer using petrol.

Australia spends AU$20 billion to AU$30 billion a year on petrol, depending on the oil price and the currency. If we're able to convert the whole fleet over, then the renewable energy costs to power that fleet would be around AU$5 billion a year.

Who do we create the most value for the quickest then? The people who drive the most number of kilometers, because that's when we're displacing the largest amount of petrol. These drivers are the most attractive for us because, when you look at the lifetime cost of a car, much of it goes into the petrol tank not the vehicle itself. … Read more

California start-up Better Place and Danish utility Dong Energy said Tuesday they have lined up financing to bring an electric car charging network to Denmark by 2011.

The two organizations have secured almost $103 million in equity and convertible debt that will go toward constructing stations where drivers can swap in fresh batteries for electric cars.

Better Place's business plan focuses on building a network of automated battery-swapping stations along driving corridors. Places to rapidly charge or get fresh batteries will address the range limitations of existing car batteries, according to Better Place.

Although Better Place has announced customers … Read more