Better Place Look Ma No Batteries

The saga of Project Better Place that is now in liquidation is pretty interesting.  The 900 folks in Israel and the 400 in Denmark bought an electric car but never bought the battery for the car.  Project Out Of Space was going to lease the batteries to the car owners on a fee for service basis based on distance traveled each month.

http://www.haaretz.com/business/better-place-s-patents-held-overseas-liquidator-says.premium-1.526969

Not So Shai Agassi the wunderkind of Time Magazine, Davos, and TED had this idea that he could lease multiple unaffordable battery packs for EVs to folks who would drive up to his Jetson like service station for a battery swap.

Now that his sponsors got tired of throwing money down the drain the whole idiotic business is in liquidation and the Pioneers on the Better Place Electric Highway have covered wagons with no oxen or horses to pull them along the trail.  What a mess!   Only Arne’s hydrogen highway in California is a bigger fiasco.

As Charlie Rose and Thomas Friedman, two of America’s greatest minds and forward thinkers plugged Better Place (get the pun), I think the 900 Israeli and 400 Danish owners of these cars without batteries should sue these two pundits for pain and suffering.  Thomas said the world was flat so maybe in Denmark the owners can simply hitch the battery-less electric Renault to a horse and get around the country that way.

I really like the photo of the African man pulling the cart with his tired donkey resting on the cart.  This is the metaphor for the whole Better Place thermodynamic fake out that took leaders like Shimon Peres and Barak Obama for a ride. 

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/27/business/global/israeli-electric-car-company-files-for-liquidation.html?_r=0

Yeah the Tax Payers are the man pulling the cart while the ass (symbol of the Democrats) gets a free ride.   Man are we lucky the Republicans are not looking for a free ride as pulling an Elephant on a cart would be much more difficult based on Newton's laws of motion.   Al Gore is still claiming he invented Newton's second law and that the guy pulling the Donkey is actually saving the planet significant carbon emissions.  Al and the Kleiner Perkins team are "earnestly" asking the new secretary of energy for some Moniz to bring the man pulled donkey cart to market in a new green auto company called Finker.  The Donkey is thinking he has reached the Better Place  and is not going to tip the apple cart.