SBS's Dateline program has a segment on Better Place's electric vehicle plans - Electric Dreams. See the video here.

REPORTER: Where are we now?

SHAI AGASSI: We're at the Better Place centre in Tel Aviv.

REPORTER: And what happens here?

SHAI AGASSI: This is where people actually come to experience driving. You can actually see these guys - they're walking in right now.

TOUR GUIDE: Better Place centre is the first centre in the whole world that presents a complete solution for electric transportation.

The visitor's centre is built on the site of an old oil depot, and the irony is intentional.

TOUR GUIDE: In a symbolic way today we spread a new concept to the world coming straight from here.

Over 75,000 people have toured the facilities since it opened a year ago. They've all come to see Shai's solution to what's been the electric car's biggest problem.

REPORTER: What about the range anxiety people have, of worrying that the battery might go flat?

SHAI AGASSI: Well, I think if you have a fixed battery electric car, you should be worried. You're tethered to your home.

REPORTER: So this is a car which comes with a battery.

SHAI AGASSI: We actually address that with a switchable battery electric car.

It might not look like much but this is the heart of Agassi's solution.

SHAI AGASSI: We brought in a disruptive thought that you're not bound to your battery, you're not bound to the range of that battery. You can exchange the battery and keep going.

TOUR GUIDE: With your card you will be recognised with your car. It will take you to the spot where the battery will be switched and your car will be washed.

Instead of spending hours recharging, customers will drive into a switch station and swap the depleted battery for a fully-charged one.

TOUR GUIDE: We use this switch station if you go a long distance - If you want to go very far.

It takes less time than it takes to refuel a petrol car thanks to a mechanism adapted from the one that holds the bombs in place on F-16 jets. By the end of the year they hope to have over 40 switch stations across the country.

SHAI AGASSI: The switchable battery electric car allows you to use all the batteries that are on the road. Any location you are in has a GPS which tells you how far you are from your next location and from the next switch station, it gets away from the anxiety, you actually, you're always aware of where you are and whether you'll make it to the next stop. It becomes almost second nature not to think about it.

At the Frankfurt Motor Show two years ago, Renault agreed to mass-produce an electric vehicle with a switchable battery. They committed to making 100,000 cars named the Fluence- ZE.

SHAI AGASSI: It's the first mega-deal for electric cars in history. There has not been a car since the Ford Model T that has been sold at 100,000 volume, driving on anything other than gasoline. If you'll look back at history, today was the beginning of the electric era and potentially the end of the oil era.

Sometimes people have to remind you to aim high. Most of us are afraid of aiming high for fear of failure and our biggest failure is that we aim too low.

He's certainly aiming high with plans to open his networks of Charge Spots and Switching Stations across the globe. The roll-out has already begun in Denmark, Hawaii, Japan, and Canada and will soon becoming to Australia.

SHAI AGASSI: This is the Network Operating Centre. This is the hub, the backbone if you want of running a network around a country. Somebody needs to manage that the current is coming in, nobody ran over a spot, there are no emergencies, and so you need to run it as a utility. That's what we've built here.

REPORTER: But this is very small!

SHAI AGASSI: You know, from this centre we can actually manage any network in any country. Guys, can you put a map on the screen, Israel, Denmark, any of the countries that are running?

Thanks to Shai's computing background, the system will be able to balance the demand across the power grid as well as micro-manage its customer's needs.

SHAI AGASSI: When you come in it knows that you're a certain distance from home, how much battery do you need, what time it is based on that, are you at work, what's the probability you'll need to drive it in the next few hours, all that information is used by the computer inside the car to give us a priority rating on your need for charge right now.

TOUR GUIDE: To get to 100% battery capacity we need to charge for 1hour and 42 minutes.

The WSJ has an article on Ford's electric car plans and their efforts to integrate with smart grids - Ford Plans Vehicles to Tap Power Grids.

Ford Motor Co. is launching an in-vehicle technology to let its customers recharge electric cars when energy rates are low.

The "smart" charging concept announced Tuesday is key for all auto makers that are pursuing electric vehicles in a variety of forms, from plug-in gas-electric hybrids to fully electric cars and trucks that use no gasoline. Most of those vehicles are still months, if not years, away from reaching showrooms.

But car companies say that in order for electrified cars to be accepted widely, the companies must steer customers away from sapping too much power from the electric grid during peak hours—which could be cost-prohibitive and threaten the grid's stability. They also want consumers to be able to charge their cars quickly and at the most efficient times.

Developing an electric vehicle was relatively easy compared with working with "our partners at energy providers," Bill Ford, the auto maker's executive chairman, said during a question-and-answer session at the company's Dearborn, Mich., test track. There are more than 3,000 utility companies, and just a handful of auto companies.

The touch-screen technology will allow the car owner to program how to recharge the vehicle, even delaying the recharge for the middle of the night or choosing to tap renewable energy generated by wind or sun. A similar system is expected to be used when General Motors Co.'s Chevy introduces its plug-in Volt car late next year, a company spokesman said.

Other car makers working on electric vehicles include Toyota Motor Co., Mitsubishi Motors Corp. and Fuji Heavy Industries Ltd., maker of Subarus. Nissan Motor Co. announced this year it will build 100,000 electric cars a year at its plant in Smyrna, Tenn., by 2013.

Ford plans to bring to market a pure battery electric Transit Connect commercial van next year, an all-electric Focus compact car in 2011, and a plug-in hybrid electric vehicle in 2012. ...

When plugged in, Ford's battery systems in plug-in hybrids will be able to talk to the electrical grid through "smart" meters provided by utility companies via wireless networking. The owner uses an in-dash computer to choose when the vehicle should recharge, for how long and at what utility rate.

All 21 SUVs in Ford's experimental fleet of plug-in hybrid Escapes eventually will be equipped with the vehicle-to-grid communications technology.

Tony Posawatz, vehicle line director for the Volt program, said that the kind of technology unveiled by Ford Tuesday was already demonstrated by GM in December.

Instead of relying on so-called "smart" utility meters, the Volt will be able to interact with utility companies remotely through GM's OnStar technology. "The point is some of our competitors will rely on technology that requires smart meters, which is years away," Mr. Posawatz said. "We do not."

While meeting with Susan Cischke, group vice president of sustainability, environment and safety engineering at Ford Motor Company, we got on the topic of Better Place.

Cischke was in town pitching the 2010 Taurus, which comes equipped with keyless entry, a key that can be programmed to block the radio until seatbelts are fastened (handy if you lend your car to your children), and the EcoBoost engine which ups the gas mileage to 28 miles per gallon on the highway and 17 in the city — important for Ford which has lagged in this area.
But the real miles per gallon improvements will come from the fleet of hybrids Ford is planning and, in 2011, Ford will roll out its first all-electric Ford Focus.

Cischke has met multiple times with Palo Alto-based Better Place Founder Shai Agassi, whose pitching a new model for electric cars whereby car owners don’t own the battery in their car. Instead, Better Place would own electric car batteries and lease them back to car owners, plus sell the electricity used to charge the battery to the customers. The model relies on hundreds of thousands of public car charging stations for in-town charging, plus battery swapping stations where customers can swap out batteries in just a few minutes when a longer battery range is required.

While Cischke said she and Ford are staying open-minded about different models, she’s skeptical about Better Place for a number of reasons.

1. Better Place is a middle man: What’s stopping PG&E Co. or Ford Motor Co. from owning car batteries or selling power to customers through their own charging stations without the help of a middle man?

2. Battery swapping stations are not realistic: Hundreds if not thousands of these would have to be built across the country before this idea could work — an expensive endeavor and the same kind of problem that derailed the advent of hydrogen as a fuel source for autos. Stocking every kind of battery for every electric vehicle will be a nightmare. And actually switching out batteries will prove difficult since every car will be designed differently and batteries weigh thousands of pounds. “My view is that until infrastructure is ready and charging stations are everywhere, a plug-in hybrid makes a lot more sense,” Cischke said.

3. Who will finance a car that has no battery? What value is a car without the battery, and what companies would be willing to finance just the body, sans battery. Cischke guesses not too many.

4. Financial support is not yet apparent here: Better Place has demoed it’s model in Denmark and Israel and where it had full support of the government – including excise taxes that support the installation of infrastructure there. But there seems little hope that the U.S. government will provide the same financial support. Even in the Bay Area where Mayors announced a plan to jointly electrify, touting Better Place as a solution, no money has changed hands.

5. Other models might prove cheaper, easier and ultimately more appealing: Ford said its looked at lots of other business models, hoping to integrate the best solutions for getting the most out of electric cars. “One thing that would change (Better Place’s) model is if quick charging technology was available,” said Cischke. That would eliminate the need for costly battery swapping stations, she said. “They (Better Place) are definitely not the only game in town,” she said.

The New York Times has a look at a rival to Project Better Place - A Car Charging Infrastructure Takes Shape

Having shipped hundreds of electric vehicle charging stations, and with repeat orders now coming in from Europe, Coulomb Technologies, a privately-held Silicon Valley company, expects to be profitable by the 2010 introduction of the Chevy Volt, according to its chief executive, Richard Lowenthal.

(Mr. Lowenthal appears in the video above, explaining the company’s ChargePoint Network.)

“Our plan was to sell a thousand stations, but we will probably double that,” he told Green Inc. last week after the company secured its third Bay Area order this year. “Our company is structured to be profitable based on early adopters.”

Founded in 2007, Coulomb is looking to crack the chicken-and-egg riddle that bedeviled the hydrogen fuel cell industry. Without a refueling infrastructure, consumers won’t buy vehicles. But no one invested in refueling stations without potential customers on the road.

“It is a very fundamental issue for the business,” Mr. Lowenthal said. “What do you do about the road trip?”

With electric vehicles, the additional problem is that in cities like San Francisco, where almost half of all vehicles park on the city’s streets, many potential buyers couldn’t recharge their cars overnight.

Mr. Lowenthal, a Cisco veteran who served as mayor of Cupertino, said that municipalities, parking companies and condo developers represent the first tranche of customers for charge points that will be deployed on city streets and in garages. They sell for $2,500 to $4,000 and can recharge an electric vehicle battery in four to ten hours.

In what might shape up to be the VHS/Betamax duel of the industry, a Coulomb rival, Better Place of Palo Alto, is looking to develop refueling stations where consumers on road trips can swap batteries in a matter of minutes. Still other companies are building rapid recharge points.

WorldChanging has a post on combining smart grids with the V2G model - with the vehicles being part of a mass public short term electric car rental operation.

What happens when disruptive ideas combine?

We’ve heard a lot about distributed energy generation and smart grids recently – cities could act as distributed power plants, channeling energy from hundreds of thousands, even millions of individual rooftops (think micro-wind and solar PV) into common use and minimizing transmission losses. In essence - your home or building generates clean power and sells the surplus to the grid at peak prices for you during the day– it buys any excess energy you need during the evening when prices are low. You could plug your hybrid car into this fabulous integrated system and depending on the time of day it would either sell surplus energy from its battery to the grid or charge itself up ready for use the next morning.

We’ve also heard a lot about product-service systems. At the moment, as I’m working on an urban mobility futures project at Forum For The Future, I’m particularly interested in the Velib scheme in Paris – the self-service, easy access bike hire scheme with banks of bikes outside metro stations and other key points that has got thousands of Parisians cycling again (Similar to Barcelona's Bicing system - ed.). You pick up a bike anywhere you need it and drop it off, no-fuss, at your destination. Like the smart grid, this is also a form of distributed infrastructure – you could call it a lightweight public transport infrastructure that smooths the peaks of demand for the more traditional system of the metro and the bus.

And if you combine them ?

A new approach to selling and recharging electric cars could overcome some of the basic issues that have kept them from being widely adopted. A startup called Project Better Place, which had the largest of any venture-funding round in 2007, raising $200 million, recently announced plans to install recharging infrastructure in Israel and Denmark and to sell electric cars using a business model much like that used today with cell phones.

The company aims to address two limitations of electric vehicles: their range is considerably less than gasoline-powered cars, and the batteries take hours to recharge from ordinary outlets. To solve the first problem, says CEO and founder Shai Agassi, Project Better Place is installing a vast grid of outlets at parking spaces throughout the country, which will allow drivers to keep batteries topped off during the day. In Israel, the company will install 500,000 outlets--one for every six parking spaces in the country--with a similar number slated for Denmark.

To address the time that it takes to recharge batteries, the company has arranged for the automaker Renault to manufacture electric cars with batteries that can easily be swapped out. The cars will have more than a hundred miles of range, which is more than enough for most daily driving. On long trips, once a battery is depleted, a driver will be able to pull into a station where a simple robotic system will remove the depleted battery and install a fully charged one. The process will only take a couple of minutes, Agassi says. The company will build 125 such stations in Israel and slightly more in Denmark.

To make this system work, Project Better Place will take an unusual approach to selling cars. The company will sell cars for a subsidized cost in return for drivers signing up for a service contract. Instead of signing up for a set number of calling minutes, as with cell phones, drivers will pay for a set number of miles. The subscription will cover the cost of renting the battery, swapping it out, and the electricity for charging it up. The number of miles driven will be tracked using a wireless network, Agassi says. The cost of the car will depend on the length of the service contract, he says. For example, the car could be free with a six-year agreement. In any case, the car will cost no more than a comparable gasoline car.