On my flight back from Ukraine in September, I happened to get into a conversation with one of the other passengers about Apple products — I was working on my iPad Mini and Macbook Air up until the second I had to board (of course). It turned out that he was an electric car owner and had a pretty unique (potentially world record) experience in his electric car.
The young man was from Israel and had bought a Renault Fluence ZE. He’s a member of the Better Place program (which provides quick battery swapping to its members so that they don’t have to spend a long time charging their cars when they’re running low on battery power). He’s also the owner of goelectric.org.il.
It was a great surprise to meet such an EV enthusiast on a flight, which seemed especially serendipitous on a flight back from a whirlwind cleantech tour in Kiev and Crimea, Ukraine. The fellow EV enthusiast made a few very notable comments during our initial conversation, so I decided to conduct an on-plane interview with him (video below).
First of all, he noted that he’d never go back to owning gasmobiles. Driving the electric Fluence is just so much nicer than driving any gasmobile that there’s no way he’s going backwards in that arena. He noted that he had driven a lot of very good cars… Porsches, BMWs, Ferraris, etc. But nothing was as nice as his Fluence ZE. (Perhaps Renault should get in touch with him for some advertising work!)
He also noted that he loved the Better Place program. He said that it is very convenient and easy to use, and he’s never had any problems with it. He talks more about the program in the video below.
One more very notable thing he noted was that he had unofficially broken a 24-hour EV driving record, driving 1,159 kilometers and swapping out 15 EV batteries along the way. Despite that being quite a long drive, he said he enjoyed the whole thing, “every second” of the trip, noting that he always loves driving his Renault Fluence ZE. Pretty impressive. Hopefully if he makes the trip again he’ll bring along someone from Guinness to confirm the record.
Check out the full video interview here:
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