"The mission is to end oil," he says, "not create a company." | Hacker News Reader

"The mission is to end oil," he says, "not create a company."

wired.com

72 pointscolortone34 comments

This could really work in Hawaii. Cut a deal with Hertz, Alamo, etc., and you have an instant user base. Oahu is so small, you could probably get away with just 20 or so swapping stations. Plus if anyone ever runs out of juice, it's pretty easy to drive out to them and swap the battery out in the field, since nothing's ever more than an island's length away.

My one thought is that he shouldn't be making the car and the battery. He needs to just design the battery stands and whatnot and license the technology to "real" car companies.

I got the impression that he wasn't making the car.. (ie - it was Renault / Nissan who were making the first batch of cars for them..

Some of the other Hawaiian islands might be even easier. Molokai has very few cars and you could go 100% this way. Plus Molokai has a huge emphasis on being green, so this would fit right in.

Hawaii sounds like a good idea. Mostly because a few rental companies own 100% of the cars. Be a good experiment.

But if you're trying to test run for the world, a resort island doesn't prove anything. Israel's just small enough to be feasible. But it's big enough & 'normal' enough to be applicable to most European Countries. It's also got a big advantage that a large number of cars are leased by employers as part of salary packages. Similar advantage to the rentals in Hawaii.

I'm hoping for Japan or South Korea.

I think there's a need for "If it worked in ___ it could also work in ___". Japan & Korea may do that for China. I'm not sure.

Israel may just do it for a lot of Europe. Even though the fact that Israel has uber high vehicle taxes (I think only Singapore is higher) gives it a huge advantage equivalent to a big subsidy. But in papers & on politicians desks it may not be the same thing.

'Tax Break' sounds better then 'Subsidies.' So a good strategy is finding somewhere with massive taxes.

I like the idea. A lot. Agassi has created a vision. An idea that is apparently appealing to a lot of people. And he has convinced two countries that are willing to put his ideas to the test. Who knows: this thing just might work!

Ethanol, Hydrogen, etc. etc. all need new distribution networks. Electricity is "everywhere". In a country like The Netherlands almost every km of highway has lamppost along the road. A city has electricity cables running everywhere. It should be easy to install a lot of those charging stations.

In Europe a lot of cities have high parking fees. What if you would lower the parking fees for electric cars? By installing charging stations at those parking spaces the city council would get a percentage of the charging costs to make up for the "loss" in parking fees.

There are however potentially other problems. If this plan makes electric cars cheaper or more economical than normal cars people will be using their cars more. And that is huge problem. Cars take up space. A lot of space. And because of the high fuel prices people were finally cutting back on their car use.

Portugal has also signed up! The third country. See: http://www.forbes.com/afxnewslimited/feeds/afx/2008/06/30/af...

You know how, sometimes, you read an article and some startup is doing the thing you thought would be cool and would displace an entire industry? But you were lazy and didn't write it down and ask for funding?

Doh...

I'm sure his skills, pedigree, connections, and past performance had nothing to do with his initial reception.

Ideas are cheap.

Eww, a cellphone style, lock in walled garden economics, on something so basic like electricity, leaves a bad taste in my mouth. If this style of business become popular, the common slashdot metaphor of "imagine if you couldn't get gas because it's a honda gas station", or "only special ford cars can go on this road" might actually become a reality.

This has happened many times before.

If you're creating a new market, often the only way to be profitable is to create lock-in. Before the PC, you had to buy a computer and the peripherals and the software from a single vendor. Once adoption hits critical mass, it makes sense to make everything interoperable. With cellphones, the walled gardens are again just breaking down. And so on.

Currently, no other strategy for moving away from gasoline is even remotely as promising; I say having to pay for charging is a small price to pay.

Won't people hack their way out? You'd need to DRM your electricity.

Cell phones get away with it because the network provides authentication. The phones themselves remain relatively unhacked because there's just so damn many.

With a car, there's no inherent service model. It'll only be a matter of time until people buy cheap cars and modify them to charge/run independently of the service. We all saw what happened to the i-Opener.

Ending oil also needs to address chemical feedstocks.

http://books.google.com/books?id=xH_JyuL08K4C&dq=methano...

The article makes me very happy.

There's lots of data here. The cost of battery deprecation is $1050. That's enormously useful information to me.

I should say that the slow charge is a problem with batteries, but not with compressed air. :-)

If anyone has the link to a video of his speech, it would be much appreciated.

Edit: http://www.betterplace.com/press-room/videos/

I'd just like to take this opportunity to plug ammonia as an alternative solution. High energy density. No nasty emissions. No need for new infrastructure. No need for new cars. We just need to ramp up ammonia production, which we need to do anyway to meet growing fertilizer requirements for a hungry growing population.

Any HNers with me?

If ammonia production is already insufficient for fertilizer requirements, wouldn't using it as fuel squeeze food production even more?

It would and does, which happens to be the situation at the moment and is one of the reasons why food is becoming more expensive.

I should have stated that I only support the ammonia economy provided the increase in ammonia production was powered by nuclear or other non carbon sources.

Doesn't synthetic ammonia production currently rely on petroleum?

Also, the other major use for ammonia is as a major fertilizer for food products. Your ammonia idea will spike the food prices just like ethanol except that it will strike every food product instead of just corn.

Still, I am not an expert on this subject. Information from knowledgeable sources would be appreciated.

nope. hydrogen for ammonia comes from steam reforming natural gas and thus generates a lot of emmissions. the haber process is incredibly energy intensive (those pesky n2 triple bonds and all). all you've done, as in most 'fuel switch' schemes is create a 'displaced emmissions' system. this also goes for electricity by the way unless, and a big unless, you source emmission free electricity. personally, i like his idea.

Of course electricity production needs to come from zero carbon sources or else there'd be no point. I just think this system is the best because it involves doing the least.

"The mission is to end oil" vs "Driven: Shai Agassi's Audacious Plan to Put Electric Cars on the Road (wired.com)"

I don't wonder why this thread gets more attention than the earlier same story here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=280245

The phone model isn't pretty. Making deals with governments, locking people into networks. But I suppose at this point, anything that works. But the end result may be ugly.

The mission should be the other way around - it should be to create a company that creates, as its byproduct, an 'end' to oil.

Holy blundering errors, Batman:

"At 38, Agassi is the youngest invitee. Just after the dotcom boom, SAP, the world's largest maker of enterprise software, paid $400 million for a small-business software company he started with his father; now he's SAP's head of products and widely presumed to be the next CEO."

He left SAP a year and a half ago after a massive power-struggle on the executive board where it was clear that he wouldn't be the next CEO. That's why he founded the "not" company that is the topic of this article. Except, well, that it's a VC backed company.

Continue reading, the article mentions that afterwards.

Seriously. Read the entire article before you post comments like that.

Yeah, my bad. I can see how it was supposed to work in context now, but usually I don't bother to continue reading an article when I get through the first third and there are things that have stopped jiving with reality.

The article jives with reality. At 38, he is the youngest invitee and he is working at SAP. A year and a half later, he is not working at SAP. You just ignored the "at 38" clause.

It's because they continued using the present tense.

Sure, I see what they mean now, but when you're looking at an article and start reading it, and get to a paragraph, written in present tense that claims something that has not been true for a few years, my brain at least labels it incorrect.

This isn't a critical reading skills exam; it's just one of the dozens of articles that crosses my feed-reader everyday and I don't consider that style to have helped the audience follow the author's point.

"A few months later, when his boss broke the news that he wouldn't be getting the top job at SAP anytime soon, Agassi shocked just about everyone in the tech world by quitting."

I wasn't shocked. In fact I'd no idea that it had happened, or even who he was.

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