Green pioneers brigade: Shai Agassi

Sunday Times
May 24, 2009
John Arlidge

SHAI AGASSI travelled halfway round the world to change a battery last week. He flew from his home in San Francisco to watch a platform scuttle along a set of metal rails, stop at an electric car, remove the vehicle’s old battery and replace it with a new one. As the metallic ballet played out, Agassi beamed.
It seemed a long way to travel for so little, but what happened in Yokohama was the culmination of a five-year ambition that might change the way we think about our cars and much else besides.
Certainly Time magazine thinks so. It recently named Agassi — a fast-talking 41-year-old with a line in snazzy suits and Prada loafers — one of the 100 most influential people on the planet. He is “the Steve Jobs of green technology — visionary, technologist, businessman”, the magazine said.
Why the fuss? Agassi is the force behind Better Place, a clean-transport company. His big idea is to kick-start the global adoption of electric cars by minimising one of the biggest frustrations with the technology: the need for slow and frequent recharges.
The robot he went to see in Yokohama is the key to his solution. The Japanese carmaker Nissan is his partner and provided a locally made electric 4x4 for the test.
Better Place and Nissan have designed a car with a removable battery. You drive into a switching station, turn off the motor and wait 45 seconds while the robot grabs the depleted battery from the underside of the car and installs a fully-charged one.
Denmark, Israel, Hawaii, districts of Australia and San Francisco’s Bay Area have agreed to build a network of battery-switching stations. Traditional “plug-in-from-the-mains” charge points will be available at homes and offices.
As well as the prototype Nissan Qashqai SUV, Renault will soon launch a saloon car based on the Mégane.
To counter criticism that electric cars “run on coal” because the electricity used to charge their batteries is generated by coal-burning power stations, Better Place will buy green energy from solar and wind generators.
It will then sell drivers “clean” pay-as-you-go miles — £150 for 1,000 miles, say, £300 for 3,000 miles, and a few hundred pounds a month for unlimited driving.
“Soon there will be countries and cities where you will be able to drive your car all day without producing any carbon dioxide at all or having any impact on the environment,” Agassi claims.
His belief has convinced backers to invest £200m — one of the largest start-up financings in history.
Renault/Nissan has committed a further £200m to building cars with removable batteries and Agassi is hoping to sign a deal to bring the technology to London. He has met Boris Johnson and describes the London mayor as “the kind of person who says ‘we gotta do something’.”
It would be easy to dismiss Agassi as just another Californian dreamer. He is anything but. He has been in business since he was a teenager when, instead of chasing girls, he was dreaming of designing software. Soon after his 14th birthday, he did his first deal, persuading his father to buy him an Apple IIe by promising him 10% of his “lifetime profits” from writing software.
It turned out to be an excellent deal: at 21, Agassi founded Top Tier Software, selling it nine years later to SAP, the German software giant, for £300m. Three more start-ups followed and by the time he was 33 he had made enough to retire.
In those days, Agassi didn’t regard himself as an environmentalist. He used to drive a souped-up Mercedes E-Class AMG, the kind of car that does gallons to the mile, not miles to the gallon. In 2005, however, he attended the World Economic Forum at Davos where delegates discussed the question “How would you make the world a better place?” His answer was: by ending the world’s addiction to oil.
Only electric vehicles can do this, he claims. Hybrids are “meaningless” half-measures because they, for now at least, require a petrol or diesel engine. Alternative fuels such as hydrogen and natural gas aren’t going to be readily available in the near future, if at all — he loftily dismisses Honda’s new FCX Clarity hydrogen car as “the fantasy-mobile”. But he still had to solve the problem of refuelling — hence the swappable battery.
His venture, though, is not entirely altruistic. Powering a car by electricity costs much less than powering it by petrol or diesel: usually about 1p a mile, compared with 16p for a petrol car. With the American market for petrol worth $275 billion (£173 billion), Agassi believes the company controlling charging stations will become wildly profitable.
Of course, there are dozens of obstacles. He has only one carmaker — Renault/Nissan — on board. Others, including the world’s biggest carmaker, Toyota, reject his scheme as unworkable. Even if some other manufacturers do sign up, he has to prove his system will work with dozens of different sizes and shapes of battery.
Creating the network of charge points and battery- switching stations may be cheaper than building petrol stations but it still requires huge investment from, most probably, governments, many of which are unwilling to invest in such a revolutionary scheme. And while the technology may be suitable for a city or a small country, it seems unlikely that it would work for a large nation such as America, which creates the most car pollution in the world.
Agassi, though, is undeterred. He has the zeal of a man who has succeeded in everything he has done and is damned if he is going to let a few local difficulties get in his way. “Some people say I’m missing the fear gene,” he joked.
One nagging question remains. What does he drive? Is there any car green enough? No, as it turns out. But he has come up with a solution. “I have two electric cars, both Toyota RAV4 EVs. You can’t buy them — they don’t make them any more — but I got hold of a couple and converted them.” It’s his way.
Chairs made from old luggage
YOU may have spent some time sitting on your suitcase in airport queues, but not like this.
Maybe Design, a firm based in Austria, has created a new line of chairs made out of discarded bags and suitcases. The hard shell serves as the backing and bottom and is filled with padding. The least imaginative part is the name: the Sit Bag.
For more details go to maybedesign.at