Project Better Place: Israel’s oil autonomy goal

Project Better Place took place last Tuesday, featuring investor Michael Granoff. The event was to promote the work of Better Place, an Israeli firm seeking to develop the first cost-effective electric car. Better Place believes they have developed a model of an electric car that will cost less than a gas car, and will be cheaper per mile to run than a gas car.

Granoff told the group of about 25 students that by 2020, Israel will no longer import oil, and if other countries follow Israel’s lead they could end all oil imports in the near future as well.

The Better Place car has no tailpipe emissions and will be easier to recharge than it is to fill up a gas tank. Since the vast majority of the world’s oil is used in gasoline, Better Place’s electric car would cause world demand for oil to plummet if successful in phasing out the gas car.

Granoff, Better Place’s leading investor and head of Oil Independence Policies, received an enthusiastic response from the assembled students. His talk, lasting roughly 45 minutes, was followed by almost half an hour of questions.

Those in attendance included representatives of the event’s three co-sponsoring organizations, the Coalition of Hopkins Activists for Israel (CHAI), Students for Environmental Action (SEA) and Engineers without Borders (EWB).

“This is one of the best attempts I’ve seen at making green technology affordable and convenient,” freshman Aaron Tessler said. “If they can show this can work [in Israel] where they’re just as Westernized as we are here, that could be a model that we see adopted in other parts of the world.”

Granoff explained that electric cars have failed to catch on so far because they are more expensive than gas cars, can’t travel as far on a single charge and aren’t supported by a network of charging stations comparable to the vast network of gas stations around the world.

Better Place believes it has solved these problems by selling consumers electric cars without expensive batteries at a cost lower than what consumers currently pay for gas cars. Consumers would receive batteries from a network of battery-change stations and would be able to swap out a dying battery for a fresh battery in a procedure that would take less than a minute. Drivers would pay Better Place per mile driven.

Granoff stresses the role that a network of battery-change stations would play in assuring drivers that an electric car would not be “range bound” and could make long trips. “Even if it’s the exceptional trip — or even if it’s the ‘never trip’ — people aren’t going to buy a car unless it can make it,” he said.

Better Place believes that this vision could work in places like Israel, Denmark and Australia where car-based cultures live in densely populated areas, and could reasonably support a network of battery-change stations. Israel in particular has already committed to this vision. Israel has put Better Place at the center of its ambitious campaign to eliminate its oil imports by the year 2020, and Israelis are set to begin driving these cars by the end of this year.

CHAI leaders said they brought Granoff to campus because many CHAI members had visited Better Place headquarters in Israel, and felt that Granoff’s presentation offered a chance to demonstrate Israel’s commitment to environmental innovation.

“CHAI supports Israel, and it’s important to point out ways Israel contributes to the world. The environment is great example,” said junior Alexandra Cohen, the Secretary of CHAI.

Meanwhile, senior Diana Wohler, the co-president of SEA sees advances in Israeli towards electric cars as an example to be emulated by the rest of the world.

“Israel is really a great model of environmental policies in small countries,” Wohler said. “It’s important that we try to break out of our ‘Hopkins bubble’ and pay attention to grassroots environmental advocacy in the rest of the world.”