Flawless Demo Supports Founder's Mission-Driven VisionBetter Place strutted its stuff recently in Yokohama, Japan, and it was a production well worth watching. The would-be leader of the nascent electric-vehicle charging industry trotted out its battery-switching technology at a demonstration project in downtown Yokohama. Better Place (BP) demonstrated that, with a national network of battery exchange stations and vehicles designed to properly interface, EV ownership wouldn't have to be subjected to any significant limitations.

The battery exchange station — the first in the world to be shown to the public — ought to come with a fork, so those who've said that lengthy recharging times will always constrain battery-electric vehicles' usefulness can eat their words.

An End to Range Anxiety
In BP's better world, a depleted battery could be swapped for a freshly charged one in less time than it takes to pump 10 gallons of gasoline into the family sedan. At the demonstration station in this bustling port city just south of Tokyo, a battery exchange was deliberately slowed down so those in the audience could follow it step-by-step. Even so, the exchange took just under 90 seconds.

If this kind of station were readily available, a cross-country trip in a battery-electric car wouldn't have to be interrupted every 200 miles or so to complete 4-6-hour battery charging sessions.

BP's founder and chief executive, Silicon Valley entrepreneur Shai Agassi, boasted that the engineering mule at the company's R&D center in Israel can do the job in as little as 40 seconds. That would get most of us into the station and back out with a fresh load of electrons in about a tenth of the time it takes to gas up a car with an internal combustion engine.