Australia is a bit bigger than Israel, but there are lots of urban areas where this could be applied.

But why oh why do people insist on mixing up electric vehicles and alternative energy - the two are completely separate and there is no need to combine the two.

Just make sure that the cars are charged at night rate low demand times when possible and do your alternative energy as a separate project.

If you have a solar cell, run your house/office off it and push the excess into the grid.

Weird place to do PBP. I assume none of these cars are going to be driving from Alice Springs to say, anywhere?

I dunno, any Aussies out there? Do people pretty much stick to their 'island' city areas? How often do folks drive across the country? (I've heard about those huge trucks...)

Aussies do not sitck to the cities. They don't normally drive accross the whole country, but readily do several hundreds around them.

Shai Agassi smelled big money to be made in upcoming vehicle electrification.

allowing consumers to have a choice of make and model.

What about allowing consumers to charge also overnight at home?
Would they allow non-subscribers to recharge for fee?

He's not talking about establishing common charging interfaces and standards for all electric cars.
I'm suspicious.

Considering that in Australia most people live in private homes they can charge cars overnight, and wouldn't need much his network, an EREV may be cheaper.

How to get off the subscription, would such car be able to charge anywhere else?
Owners of BEVs that use their cars infrequently don't want subscriptions.

It's mostly suitable for taxis and courier vehicles in Australia, for Shai Europe is a much Better Place for subscribing users.

@Aussie,

I guess that's about what I figured. Then you'd be better off with PHEVs. Mostly drive commuter type distances, but can occasionally do the long distance thing.

Besides, I can't see Max driving "the last of Lithium Iron Phosphate Interceptors".

And it would be hard to have a pre-apocalyptic car race with BEVs, even with a nuclear plume heading your way.

On the other hand, PHEVs could run on gasoline, as well as methane, even methane created by a herd of pigs under Barter Town.

:)

Seriously, I really wish I knew what this Agassi says to these people to get them to agree to this highly suspect program PBP.

Guys / Gals,

Missing a couple of important points. The first is that aussi families (like many others) have more that one car. Generation 1 for diving around the kids running earands all over the city (and suburbs) will be fine.

with a base range of about 150 - 200 km the actual recharge away from home will be relatively rare (thinks shopping centres and parking stations etc etc.

Lets do Sydney Newcastle to visit the family - 170km at 110km/h - very strictly enforced limit (risky to maintain a 120km/h average. can't make it on one charge? 5 min stop at the swap station about half way up the freeway will do the trick. My sister does this run about 20 times a year. so run around Sydney plently of trips to Newcaslte (or south or west) and you could happily live with the PBB model.

I don't like the battery swap model, I don't think it is sustainable. In fact it's not. PBB say so. It will do until we have the eestore or equivilient (and they are working on it).

Second point. - the majority of PBB charging will be done at home (named to read their litterature).

As annon. said renweables will work perfectly with BEV. electricity need are expanding and its all daytime suff (ie peak) this is where the first TW (yes I said terra) of solar will go in a national system. as we fase out the coal etc the size of the amount of installed battery capacity (both mobile and stationary) hooked up at any one time, will level the grid. at night we was lots of energy because its cheap!!!!

This is a great thing. Autralia is a real roll out market for wide sacle BEV. If it can work there, it can work anywhere!

Ciao,

Mike

The fundamental problem is that given today's technology, and even next year's and the year after, battery-powered cars cannot compete economically with gasoline powered cars. They are more expensive to build and operate, on a lifetime basis. No amount of financial legerdemain or rhetoric about cell phone models will change this. Somebody has to pay for all those battery packs, and they cannot charge enough money to end users to cover those costs, without the end users paying substantially more per mile than they would pay for an equivalent gasoline car. This is the fundamental economic and thermodynamic reality which PBP seems to be trying to obfuscate.

The only way this kind of model can work is if someone has deep enough pockets that they can take losses for the first few years, until battery technology advances to the point where it can be cheaper than gasoline. At that point they have a sustainable model, but as Jim points out, so does everybody else. What they also need is some form of lock-in, whereby at least early adopters, and ideally everyone, will be forced to continue to buy from the organizations that took those huge losses in the first place. That way these up-front investments and losses can be covered down the line, and all you need to do is to find investors who are willing to wait potentially quite a few years for payback.

But again, as Jim points out, this can't work if a free market is allowed to continue to operate among competing EV manufacturers, because that will undercut the lock-in which has to be a key ingredient in the economic witches' brew.

Would a 15 minute full charge with three phase power make battery electric cars more viable? Blade Electric Vehicles, a company in country Victoria which sells Hyundi Getz convervsions @ $40k (AUD) and a 100km range, believes this would be the answer to long haul trips.

Australia has a heavily urbanised population with the vast majority of trips being >100km daily commuting so short range BEVs aren't as unworkable in Australia as many posters seem to suggest. Maintaining a different set of technology eg LPG for long haul trips might not be as ideal as we have had it with cheap oil as a universal transport fuel but we should be putting alternatives in place before shortages hit us hard.

I agree that battery change stations are unworkable if only for the cost of the infrastructure alone, although standardised battery packs could be made by different companies with different, higher capacity chemistries if the car's discharge/recharge electronics were made to be flexible enough. Admittedly, I don't know if this is possible with current or theoretical technology.

PBPs proposal does seem like pie in the sky but we are running out of time and, unfortunately, maybe even half baked options need to be seriously considered in the absence of a mature alternative transport technology which should have been under development over the past twenty years.

I don't know if there is an answer to the high cost of batteries. Would economies of scale and carbon charges be enough to make BEVs competitive?

Cheers,

Cam

Quoth Hal:

The fundamental problem is that given today's technology, and even next year's and the year after, battery-powered cars cannot compete economically with gasoline powered cars. They are more expensive to build and operate, on a lifetime basis. No amount of financial legerdemain or rhetoric about cell phone models will change this.

It's not.  Any entity running a lot of properly-designed battery chargers can sell these services to the grid:

1. Reactive power generation.
2. Regulation.
3. At the extreme, peak power generation.

With a revenue stream from the grid side of the system and a subscription model for the batteries (so the user doesn't have to care about wearing it out; it's somebody else's problem) a lot of the cost disadvantages with EVs are reduced or even eliminated.  Note that the ICEV enjoys fuel courtesy of large military expenditures which aren't charged to it at the pump, so the true cost advantage of the EV would be much larger.

"They are more expensive to build and operate, on a lifetime basis."

And operate? With gasoline priced at $4.00 and lubricants at $3.50/quart?

Some of these arguments and claims just reek of "paid to write this junk."

E-P,

Even if that was true, you still have a vehicle that goes about 100 miles or so, and then needs 8 hours to recharge.

No go.

The only recourse at present are PHEVs (no added infrastructure needed except some outlets) or battery swap stations (horrifically complicated and specific infrastructure needed).

Quoth Engineer-Poet:

Harvey: just as long as you aren't proposing a nightmare like battery-swap stations for long-distance driving, it should be relatively easy.

Maybe we should just agree to disagree? I appreciate that a larger pack makes some aspects of EV easier (you can use lower performance batteries). But I think that can also be handled technically, either by employing U-Caps (in addition to batteries) for boost, current regulation, and that grid malarky you've talked about, or going with a parallel hybrid strategy (like the Prius) instead of a serial hybrid (like the Volt) to limit max current draws from the pack. Or both.

Now you talk about adding spare vehicles ICE vehicles to the swap stations. Yikes! This is drifting into madness again.

If one can get PHEVs to work, then you'd could still have the grid interaction (and the benefits therein) but it would only involve the driver, the utility, and maybe the car company, and maybe the gov't. But no huge infrastructure provider that does not even exist at this point.

I'd say that if PHEVs are out, one would be better off changing driver mentality to deal with lower range EVs, rather than developing swap stations. Maybe this means having 2 cars, or better synergy with public transportation, or something like that.

If oil has proven to be an indulgence that has led to unreasonable expectations (personal transportation with unlimited range on demand) then sating that with another expensive thing is probably not the best way to handle it.

Quoth Jim:

Now you talk about adding spare vehicles ICE vehicles to the swap stations.