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smart electric car plugged into Amsterdam's charging network.

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05-Feb-2012

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Shouldn't We Be Paying Attention to Shai Agassi?

Davey G. Johnson wonders why more of us aren't listening to what Better Place founder Shai Agassi is saying and doing in the making electric vehicles really practical.

Some people spend a lot of time lamenting that early in the last century, electric vehicles lost the race to petroleum-fueled models, that the past somehow irrevocably broke the future.

The fact of the matter is, the future isn't broken. It will just be different, as the future always is. Our mobility choices only about a century and a quarter ago, when Gottlieb Daimler unveiled his Patent-Motorwagen, were radically different from what they are now. In the future, they will be different still. Perhaps not as whiz-bang swell as Marty McFly's hoverboard, but certainly different.

Elon Musk, of course, believes that the future belongs to the battery-electric vehicle. I remember being at the unveiling of the Tesla Roadster at the Santa Monica airport back in the summer of 2006 and thinking to myself, “If everything they say about this car is true, they've really done it--they've addressed the fears and built something viable here.”

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