AbleBrains

Out of the mouths of babes...

The business case for sustainable, green transportation.

Via The Long Tailpipe

Project Better Place Announcement Speech

Here is Shai's speech announcing the Renault-Nissan, PBP, Israel initiative.  Excellent actually. I've always enjoyed listening to him speak but this is truly a good speech.  I wonder if Shai wrote it himself. Shai?

Israel Via Project Better Place to Promote Electric Cars

Via Drudge and the NYTimes.  The article tells the story about how Shimon Peres picked up on Shai's idea to build electric car infrastructure and asked him to run with. it.

clipped from www.nytimes.com On Monday, the Israeli government will announce its support for a broad effort to promote the use of electric cars, embracing a joint venture between an American-Israeli entrepreneur and Renault and its partner, Nissan Motor Company. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, with the active support of President Shimon Peres, intends to make Israel a laboratory to test the practicality of an environmentally clean electric car. The state will offer tax incentives to purchasers, and the new company, with a $200 million investment to start, will begin construction of facilities to recharge the cars and replace empty batteries quickly. The idea, said Shai Agassi, 39, the software entrepreneur behind the new company, is to sell electric car transportation on the model of the cellphone. Purchasers get subsidized hardware — the car — and pay a monthly fee for expected mileage, like minutes on a cellphone plan, eliminating concerns about the fluctuating price of gasoline.

The White House and Whales

Don't you just love when your government holds itself to the same standards as it holds its citizens?  I sure do!  So proud, so proud.

clipped from dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com Last August, the Natural Resources Defense Council persuaded a federal judge in Los Angeles to order a stop to Navy training exercises off Southern California using medium-range sonar. The judge said that the Navy’s own assessments predicted that dozens of marine mammals, particularly deep-diving whales, could be harmed by the intense sound waves. In January, a fresh injunction was issued by the court requiring the Navy to establish a 12-nautical-mile, no-sonar zone along the coast and to post lookouts for marine mammals. While traveling in the Middle East on Tuesday, President Bush issued an exemption to the Navy from environmental laws that would otherwise limit its ability to use certain kinds of sonar used in anti-submarine warfare training, the Associated Press said.

Shai's Trying to Make the World A Better Place

Zoli, outlines Shai Agassi's new Project Better Place, an initiative funded to the tune of $200MM USD to deploy a grid for electric cars.  Great stuff!

Shai re-emerged, launching  Project Better Place, a company funded to the tune of $200M, which intends to deploy the infrastructure needed to support eletric vehicles.

Project Better Place wants to create the grid of recharge and battery exchange stations, and here comes the interesting part: they want to follow the mobile phone industry’s business model, offering subscribers to the grid subsidized cars that are “cheaper to buy and operate than today’s fuel-based cars”.

Update: 10:08AM 10/28/07: Coverage by the New York Times