Friday, May 29, 2009

Another good TedTalk

Shai Agassi's talk at TED this February, presented his vision for how we could make electric cars feasible now and why it's the best way to go now. He's not the most amazing speaker, but there are quite a few good ideas in here.

The key idea of the whole thing, and the idea behind BetterPlace, is swapping batteries instead of charging them. If automated, it could be quicker than fueling up a gas car. It starts to make the electric car pretty appealing.

The rest of the talk is a rambling mix of tales of his attempts to get governments to buy into his vision and more reasons why we need to make the switch to electric. One bit I liked was his a recounted conversation with someone from the Israeli government in which he proposed turning some large tract of land into a solar farm that would power all the cars in the country. His point was that they'd not hesitate if that same piece of land held enough oil to run those cars for some number of years. The solar power would never run out. I really like that point of view for setting aside large tracts of land for solar.