Charged Up for Electric Cars

Shai Agassi, once a senior executive at the international software giant SAP, has become a proselytizer for cars that run only on electricity. He isn't selling cars, though; he's selling a business plan. Agassi wants private investors and governments to work together to build recharging stations at parking spaces and rig them so that motorists can be billed online for the electricity they use. Fully charged cars would be able to go 100 miles or so; for longer trips, motorists would be able to pull into stations resembling car washes and exchange their spent batteries for fresh ones.

As head of the Silicon Valley-based Better Place, Agassi has raised $200 million and reached agreements with Israel, Denmark, Australia, San Francisco Bay-area governments and, just last week, the government of Hawaii to establish supportive policies and infrastructure. Renault-Nissan will provide electric cars in Israel as early as 2010.

Last week, Agassi discussed the plight of the big three Detroit automakers and his hopes for his own company. Here is an edited version of his conversation with Post financial correspondent Steven Mufson.

Q. How did you end up in the car business?

A. I was asked to deliver a presentation at the World Economic Forum on "how to make the world a better place by 2020." That was in 2005. My project was to figure out a framework for how to convert an entire country from oil by the market, not by edict and not as a science project.

I put forward an idea for governments. Then [Israeli President] Shimon Peres said, "If you believe it but don't do it yourself, why would anybody else jump on it?" With that kind of challenge from a president, I had to quit what I was doing and go build Project Better Place.

What do you think of the Detroit automakers' new business plans and their appeal for federal assistance?

They've got a car that's running on only two wheels, and they're going to throw away some of the baggage.

We've had 100 years of Car 1.0. Thirty years after the Model T, we had Pearl Harbor. We've seen the value of a functioning car industry. A month after Pearl Harbor, we converted [the auto industry] into the lifeline of the world. A third of a century later, during the oil crisis, the industry had to change. But we squandered the opportunity. We let the Japanese carmakers come into the U.S. and do whatever they wanted. The oil shock came [and went], and we went on building tanks known as SUVs and Hummers.

The significance of the 1941 shock was that we converted to building tanks instead of cars and sent them to the soldiers. The symbolism of the second shock is that we actually sent tanks to the consumers. We squandered the opportunity to redesign this industry to disconnect from oil.

What would your plan for all-electric vehicles mean for the countries that adopt it and for the U.S. auto industry?