To lease or not to lease, that is the question. And it has been the question running in the minds of many carmakers as they ponder how to turn their gasoline car business model around to embrace the relatively low-maintenance electric vehicle (EV).
My lease is up. My BMW i3 — my snappy and ugly duckling — has been returned to AVIS. There was a waiting line, so no chance of extending the lease. I have a reservation for the Tesla Model 3 due to be delivered by the end of the year. So, while I ponder on what to do next, let me recap which EVs I have experienced in the last 7 years. Luckily I have a bunch of electric bikes (some hand-built) that I can ride in the meantime, and I promise you they are nothing you would expect — but that’s another story.
By Mira Inbar @Mirainbar When Tesla announced last year that it was going to build battery swapping stations, many journalists and industry insiders harkened back to the legacy of Better Place, the Israeli startup that built its business model around battery swapping stations. Better Place lost $812 million when it … [continued]
Originally published on Gas. How would you run a whole country without oil? Israeli entrepreneur Shai Agassi wanted to find out, and the result was a company called A Better Place. Through a network for charging stations and robotic battery swapping stations, Agassi had grand ambitions to banish oil from … [continued]
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 … [continued]
Better Place, the organization that tried to introduce the concept of battery swapping for electric cars on a large scale but went bankrupt, has just been sold to “Sunrise Group” for $12 million. Since its start in 2007, Better Place lost $823 million and only sold 950 electric vehicles. It … [continued]
Yosef Abramowitz, dubbed as “Captain Sunshine” wants to purchase Better Place (its assets), which is currently in financial trouble and winding down its operations outside of Israel. Better Place filed for bankruptcy last month after selling approximately 900 cars in Israel and 400 in Denmark. Abramowitz actually built Israel’s first commercial … [continued]
This article was originally published on CleanTechnica sister site Planetsave. First, two fun videos to get us rolling: http://youtu.be/qKg-LPOXIMs We’re trying to get more electric vehicle (EV) stories going on Planetsave. To catch readers up, below is a roundup of the 33 top EV stories of 2013 so far (according … [continued]
This article originally appeared on RenewEconomy. Better Place, the electric car network operator that aspired to transform the world’s car industry within a decade, is about to file for liquidation – an apparent victim of wanting to do too much, too soon, or just not doing it very well. Report … [continued]
Beyond our own electric vehicle (EV) stories, here are some topic EV stories from around the interwebs from the past week or so: Trains Hybrid Trains are the Future: EU to Fit KERS Systems to High-speed Rail Thanks to the success of the Prius and others, hybrids have become a … [continued]
