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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

Israel is so small that you can go anywhere on one charge.

Plus, I remember seeing a video years ago from some electric car visionary (didn't went very far) that argued Israel is basically an island. In the west there is a sea and in the north/east/south there are hostile nations/deserts that you don't want to drive to.

Compared to most other nations it's easy to bootstrap an electric driving infrastructure in Israel, because you don't have to do a continental wide rollout.

Oh, Better Place. I met their CEO once. He's really good looking, he's a great speaker, and his business plan made no sense. They burned through about a billion dollars and never did more than a few demos and a few hundred Renaults driven by their employees. But he was really good at getting close to heads of state and issuing press releases.

The whole battery swap thing was a bet against batteries and charging technology getting better.

It’s also a small market: 9 million inhabitants.

Tesla is a small scale producer, so their market sizes can be quite small (Norway's population is 5 million and a key market). What drives the market is desire, money and charging. It seems Israel has the first two but hasn't got a good charging infrastructure yet. Once it does, combined with increased incentives for electric cars, I imagine it'll be a good market for them.

What charging infrastructure? You would literally need two or three charging spots for the whole country.

That's not how people use their cars or charging stations! People don't drive to places to charge their cars, they drive their cars to get places and park where they can charge. A charging infrastructure needs to have charging stations a few minutes walk away from where people are going to.

Oslo is roughly 454 km² and it has over 400 charging stations. Oslo has a lot of electric cars because of incentives and the relative ease of finding somewhere to charge your car. Tel Aviv's centre is 52km² and its metropolitan area is 1,519 km², so it alone is going to need quite a few charging stations.

Well, not quite. Electric cars are a good fit for a warm climate (so you don't have to spend too much power on the heater), lots of sun, and no oil.

Like Hawaii, which just passed 10,000 electric cars and has more solar power than the power company can absorb during the day.

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