Cars and Batteries
The first prototype car is the Renault Laguna with a battery instead of a fuel tank and an electric motor instead of an internal combustion engine. The battery for electric vehicles is a Lithium iron phosphate ion device. The range of the car running on just one battery is from about 160 kilometres (100 mi) to 190 kilometres (120 mi). By replacing the battery at a battery switch station, the range between longer charging stops is limited only by the geographical distribution of the battery-swapping infrastructure.
The second demo car is the Nissan eRogue, an electric car based on the Renault-Nissan Rogue, half way between a sedan and an SUV in size.
The Renault Fluence Z.E. was announced at the Frankfurt Motor Show on September 15, 2009 as the first electric car to be available on the Better Place network using a switchable battery. Shai Agassi said that EVs must be sold $5,000 cheaper than the price of the average gasoline car to be successful. In April 2010 Renault announced that sales of the Fluence Z.E. are scheduled for 2011 in Israel, Denmark and the rest of Europe. In August 2010 Better Place announced a non-binding order of 100,000 Renault Fluence ZE and 4 months later Better Place claimed to have sold 70,000 cars from that order, a year away from the public launch of the Better Place network.
The floor-mounted battery packs in these electric cars are designed to be changed out robotically in less than 2 minutes, less time than the average petroleum refuel, allowing for battery-swap services like those proposed by Better Place and Tesla Motors. Better Place expects battery packs to cost between US 4¢ and 5¢ per mile over their life, provide the cars with a 160 km (99 mi) range per charge, perform for 2000 recharge cycles, and last for 8 years.
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Famous quotes containing the words cars and/or batteries:
“When, at rare intervals, some thought visits one, as perchance he is walking on a railroad, then, indeed, the cars go by without his hearing them. But soon, by some inexorable law, our life goes by and the cars return.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Postmodernism is, almost by definition, a transitional cusp of social, cultural, economic and ideological history when modernism’s high-minded principles and preoccupations have ceased to function, but before they have been replaced with a totally new system of values. It represents a moment of suspension before the batteries are recharged for the new millennium, an acknowledgment that preceding the future is a strange and hybrid interregnum that might be called the last gasp of the past.”
—Gilbert Adair, British author, critic. Sunday Times: Books (London, April 21, 1991)