by: Martin Schwoerer
What are electric vehicles good for? At the moment, for driving not more than 100 or 200 miles. In the future, your radius might expand to distances of 300 miles. But Better Place, the self-proclaimed global provider of electric vehicle services, wants to offer something completely different: an electric car you drive away in after you've travelled a few hundred miles in a train.
The first country for this will be Denmark, and on October 22, Better Place announced a first-of-a-kind agreement to intermesh two quite different, but compatible means of electric transport.
Better Place calls this the "shared electric vehicle" service, which will start at a number of major Danish train stations in 2010.
The service contains two main elements. The first is the creation of an infrastructure to charge EV's at a number of train stations, and the second is the goal to establish a joint EV-sharing scheme at the main commuter stations.
How will it work for the user? By using a PC (and in the future, probably a smart phone too), the customer will be able to book train tickets, make seat reservations and order an EV from a joint sharing scheme. So, customers will have an easy and (hopefully) reliable way to go from one end of the country to the other in the greenest, most comfortable and efficient manner.
This sounds like an excellent and logical step towards making travel 100% electric. After all, many users of trains in Europe like the greenness of rail travel and will appreciate not having to rent a car or take a taxi upon completing a train trip.
But is it a completely new approach? Several train operators, such as SNCF in France or Deutsche Bahn in Germany, already offer joint train-to-car services which offer easy reservation systems on their websites. Electrifying the car park sounds like an inevitable step, with or without Better Place.
Here's something more ambitious. In a recent speech at Munich's eCarTec conference, Better Place's Rolf Schumann brainstormed about how young people aren't so fixated on buying their own car. The youngest generation, Schuman said, might find it enticing to co-own (and co-administer) an electric car by using a Facebook application. You and your buddies sign up with Better Place, each pays a low basic fee per month, and when you need your car, you reserve it online or via iPhone app, with none of the smelly-interior hassle one gets from sharing a car with strangers. Now, that sounds like a truly innovative approach to providing electric mobility.
