After lots of initial enthusiasm and many deals done, Project Better Place is starting to attract some critics. The most recent fault-finding flak comes from Karin Kloosterman who suggests that PBP is "green smoke and mirrors." In a piece for the Huffington Post....wait a sec., isn't that a website for latte-slurping, Prius-collecting, (etc. etc.) liberals who are all gaga about the prospect of electric cars? We'll leave it to you to decide which media outlets are fair and balanced while we focus on this one article.
The Kloosterman piece takes issue with the Project Better Place model on a few fronts. After a few niceties, she takes a jab at the subscription part of the model, comparing it to the Sony Betamax debacle suggesting that the proprietary nature of the battery and car would not compete well in an open market. She follows up that somewhat salient point with the mention of a couple of the problems of establishing battery-swapping infrastructure such as cost and available real estate.
Her final points are mostly borrowed from an Israeli commentary. While the suggestion that it may not be a stroke of genius to introduce two million new private cars into the small country and instead divert national development money to city-connecting light rail projects, though slightly overstated, has its merits, her advice to wait until Israel develops a different method of electricity generation does not. While the coal used now may be nasty and ought to be phased out as quickly as possible, it is still cleaner than a multitude of new tailpipes, not to mention that if planned properly, the existing generation capacity may well be sufficient to power the first few years of electric-car influx, thereby reducing overall pollution and CO2 production and giving further impetus to cleaner future energy generation. Your opinion is always welcomed in the comments section after the post.
[Source: Huffington Post]
The Kloosterman piece takes issue with the Project Better Place model on a few fronts. After a few niceties, she takes a jab at the subscription part of the model, comparing it to the Sony Betamax debacle suggesting that the proprietary nature of the battery and car would not compete well in an open market. She follows up that somewhat salient point with the mention of a couple of the problems of establishing battery-swapping infrastructure such as cost and available real estate.
Her final points are mostly borrowed from an Israeli commentary. While the suggestion that it may not be a stroke of genius to introduce two million new private cars into the small country and instead divert national development money to city-connecting light rail projects, though slightly overstated, has its merits, her advice to wait until Israel develops a different method of electricity generation does not. While the coal used now may be nasty and ought to be phased out as quickly as possible, it is still cleaner than a multitude of new tailpipes, not to mention that if planned properly, the existing generation capacity may well be sufficient to power the first few years of electric-car influx, thereby reducing overall pollution and CO2 production and giving further impetus to cleaner future energy generation. Your opinion is always welcomed in the comments section after the post.
[Source: Huffington Post]
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