Shai Agassi's Electric Car Vision: Making the World a "Better Place" Shai Agassi, the Israeli founder of Better Place, LLC, has gained worldwide attention for his uniquely entrepreneurial approach to many of the perceived problems with the electric car. A former executive with the SAP technology company who had previously started several successful businesses, his chance attendance at an economic forum in 2005 caused him to turn his energies to the vexing problem of how to reduce and eventually eliminate the world's dependence on fossil fuels.

Even though many people sympathize with the environmental aims of the electric car, they can often hold a perception that charging them is tremendously inconvenient. While gas stations exist in multiple locations in virtually every city in the United States, there is simply not a grid of electric power stations currently available to charge electric vehicles (also known as EVs).

The unpopularity of the EV among the public makes manufacturers unwilling to put scarce research and development dollars toward them, creating a vicious cycle that will ultimately stunt the development of this rechargeable tool. Better Place aims to break this vicious cycle by changing the way manufacturers and the public think about electric transportation.

Thus far, the primary paradigm for providing power to an EV has been the charging station, which links electric vehicles to an existing power grid supplied by wind, solar, or other renewable energy.

In this regard, Shai Agassi's company is one of the most advanced in the field, having opened up its first charging station in Israel in 2008.

Customers of his company's electric cars will also be provided with a personal charging station so that they can charge cars overnight at their homes.

However, the most advanced EV infrastructure can still take hours to charge a car, and it is difficult to imagine harried commuters planning their days around the hours it will take to put more electricity in their vehicles.

Additionally, it is unrealistic to expect that people will remember to charge their cars each and every night. Many market observers feel that this will ultimately doom the electric car. So, what is to be done?

Agassi's company has come up with a novel, elegant, and unique solution for this classic problem of EV infrastructure. This entrepreneur's vision is that electric battery "changing" stations (not to be confused with "charging stations," with an "R") will one day be as widespread as gas stations. These battery changing stations will use robots to swap the batteries out from under Agassi's electric cars and replace them with fully charged batteries in the same amount of time it would otherwise take to visit a traditional gas station.

This solution to what has thus far been seen as the fundamental problem of electric transportation has been called revolutionary by some observers and seems to be the clearest solution thus far to the problem of the undesirability of the electric car. Furthermore, these robotic battery changing stations are no longer a corporate dream, as the first one opened in Israel in March 2011.

Having recognized that the customer experience is possibly the most crucial element in the successful adoption of electric transportation, Agassi's company has developed other innovations to assist customers with the daily use of their vehicles. Agassi's cars will automatically alert drivers to approximately at what point they will need to charge their cars on any given drive, and advise them of all nearby charging and battery changing stations.

The fact is that many people around the world are not willing to give up the convenience they have come to enjoy over decades of car ownership, and rather than trying to change people's minds about this, Better Place is trying to adapt to consumer needs while running a profitable enterprise. Therefore, to many people, such as Israeli president Shimon Peres (one of Agassi's first backers), Agassi's company can serve as a model for how business solutions and consumer preferences can be taken into account in moving forward with efforts to save the global environment.