Charging ahead to push electric cars

Better Place created a stir last month when it announced an ambitious plan to install thousands of electric-car charging sites and battery-replacement stations around the Bay Area.

The idea is to jump-start the adoption of electric vehicles by providing places where people can easily charge them, leading, the company's founder hopes, to a reduction in global dependence on oil.

Better Place and its competitors are betting that providing a variety of charging choices will help overcome the chicken-and-egg question that bedevils electric cars -- which do you build first, the cars or the infrastructure to keep them running?

If they succeed, the result could be the upending of Detroit's century-old business model -- an objective that Better Place founder Shai Agassi calls Car 2.0.

In this vision of the automotive future, cars will run on emission-free power supplied from renewable energy sources while being connected to a wireless network of charging stations, battery monitors and payment channels.

While the Detroit automakers are looking to Washington for money to stay in business, a growing number of policymakers, car companies and entrepreneurs think the industry needs a reboot instead of a rescue.

In addition to Better Place, companies such as Ener1 -- a New York battery provider that has developed a charging station that can deliver an 80% charge in 20 minutes -- and Coulomb Technologies Inc. of Campbell, Calif., are launching business models based on a future of electrified driving.

Agassi, a 40-year-old dot-com-bust survivor who abandoned a top post at software provider SAP to pursue his vision of an electric car future, has generated plenty of media buzz with his idea for a new approach to four-wheeled mobility.

He's also made some powerful allies, including Carlos Ghosn, head of global automaker Nissan-Renault; Israeli President Shimon Peres; and U.S. politicians such as San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom.

Agassi is simultaneously thinking big and small. He wants to electrify the world's car fleet, but he wants to do it by piecing together his vehicle-charging network one "island" at a time. Those could be virtual islands -- small nations such as Israel or Denmark, or regional communities such as the cities ringing San Francisco Bay. Or they could be actual islands -- Hawaii, for instance, where officials have endorsed Better Place's plans for a vehicle-charging network. The idea is to create a concentration of charging options that will provide relief from "range anxiety" -- the fear among electric car owners that they will be stranded with a dead battery and have no place to charge up.