UK daily "The Independent" reports that UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown wants to convert Britain's car industry to electrical vehicles and adopt the recharging and battery replacement model being developed by Shai Agassi, or a similar model. The paper says that Brown "will meet manufacturers this week to try to persuade them to mass-produce electric cars, and is considering a remarkable plan to sell the cars cheap, together with their fuel, that is modeled on mobile-phone contracts."
Under the proposed model, batteries, which are the most expensive part of the cars' cost, will be owned by the company and leased to car owners on the basis of monthly plans that include the recharging of batteries on a per kilometer basis and the replacement of empty batteries at recharging centers.
Brown met Project Better Place CEO Shai Agassi on his state visit to Israel earlier this week.
"The Independent" says that the British government is considering several electric car proposals. The paper notes that for the plan to achieve the carbon dioxide reduction target, the electrical power for the cars must come from either renewable sources or nuclear power, not fossil fuels. This is the first time that nuclear power has been mentioned as a source of power for the electric cars and as a means of oil independence for transportation.
Israeli sources point out that solar energy plants could be a source of this electricity, while Denmark is adopting wind power as the energy source.
Project Better Place said in response, "We share the British Prime Minister's vision of a changeover to clean transportation. The company does not disclose the names of countries and companies with which it is in contact for the deployment of the infrastructure before the countries make their own announcements."
Published by Globes [online], Israel business news - www.globes-online.com - on July 23, 2008
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