Better Place to file for bankruptcy | Hacker News Reader

Better Place to file for bankruptcy

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18 pointstalhof819 comments

My initial reaction is that this is a turning point in electric car technology. If there was one company suited to take the role in battery swapping like Tesla did for electric cars in general, it was Better Place. With them gone, and battery technology rapidly improving, battery swapping for consumer cars may never take off.

Just finished reading [Wide Lens][1] about innovation of ecosystems, why things can fail even if you do everything right if you ignore the ecosystems. One of their main example for the complete system, for a company which did thing right, was Better Place. I was just thinking to compare the Tesla model with Better Place. Well, I still think that the book is very insightful, just there's more to the story than it was written at that time...

[1]: http://www.amazon.com/The-Wide-Lens-Strategy-Innovation/dp/1... "Wide Lens on Amazon"

I think the main reason better place failed wasn't due to ecosystem risk. The product was just too expensive hence with little value to price and came with a pretty high risk.

All those were caused by limits of current technology, and by the need to sell in small countries(limited high end market) where charging networks could be built.

I wasn't familiar with Better Place, but the headline reads as though it would be an article outlining WHERE one should file for bankruptcy for strategic reasons.

It's somewhat sad. I really hope Better Place's demise happens because battery-swapping lost to just-keep-the-battery-in-the-car-and-charge-it strategy; not because oil-is-still-more-economical. :-/

But seriously, how will we ever be able to drive truly long distances with EVs? Super-charger stations that recharge batteries in a very short time?

The Spark takes 20 minutes to recharge apparently.

http://www.chevrolet.com/spark-ev-electric-vehicle.html says 7 hours

It says on that website "20 minutes to 80 percent [at their special charging stations]"

I'm pretty sure that heavily parallel charging of batteries made up of smaller battery cells in special supercharging stations will be the solution, combined with charging at home when you can afford to wait eight hours for charging the battery slowly.

At the moment this is just a question of existing battery technology improving enough. Right now we are in the region where this is just borderline feasible, but in five years I'm pretty sure it will seem like a no-brainer. Tesla Motors is currently building supercharging stations all over the US, and it remains to be seen whether their approach will work. Note that they are a private company with no current government involvement, and we are now a few years into the future from when Better Place started rolling out their technology. Timing is everything in this game - the obvious strategy will seem like a bad idea until suddenly it isn't.

Hmm, according to http://www.teslamotors.com/supercharger Tesla now promises to charge 150 miles of range worth of battery in 30 minutes. This isn't bad, though of course far from perfect. But yes, parallel charging of sub-batteries sounds like a good idea, one I was also thinking about at some point. It definitely sounds like (and I hope it's no more than) an engineering problem at this point.

Better Place always seemed to me like a marketing stunt. I am really not that surprised this happened. The idea, although, is still interesting. I guess another lesson of the big difference there is between a good idea and a successful implementation.

it was. the ceo stole the idea from a small-time silicon valley inventor, while said inventor was soliciting him for money. thus it was never in the US or EU where patents applied.

Interesting, got any links?

Aside from the huge money lost the investors have, my heart goes to the ~1000 car owners that are now stuck. I hope that there will be some money left to compensate them for being true early adopters and believers.

I am not sad for these particular investors, because they could've become very rich if it had taken off. With great chance for cash comes great risk of losing it and they knew it. I do feel for the early adopters, though; I hope Better Place finds some money to compensate them.

For future investors, Better Place will be a reminder not to invest in ideas that are too disruptive, even if the founder and the team seems right for the job. The companies that might never be due to this precedent is the real loss, I think.

Battery-swapping as a thing for the general public's use of electric vehicles always struck me as just stupid. It works against an important advantage of EVs (no more detours to gas stations), requires standardization of a nascent product space (does that ever work?), adds costs (at the very least, that machinery must be maintained), and confers no advantage at all for the vast majority of car use cases.

The general public simply does not take long road trips frequently enough for a full network of battery-swap stations to be viable.

I guess standardization worked pretty good for automobiles, trains, planes, telephone, electric power, radio, heck even the internet.

For instance an industry charging standard could take off easily. I think Better Place just guessed wrong.

I think you fundamentally misunderstood my comment. Either that, or you fundamentally misunderstand every single product space you mention. Standardization of nascent product spaces doesn't work at all. Most of the products you mention still aren't really standardized decades or even centuries after their invention, and/or have competing standards.

I thought it was a bad plan on Better Place's part, because it depended on the car manufacturers designing their vehicles with fast swapping in mind. And so far, none of them have done that. Mainly, IMO, because of crash performance -- batteries are heavy and so they need to be bolted into the structure of the car quite well, lest they become missiles in a crash.

So, planning your business around someone else doing something that thus far they haven't given any hints that they would -- not good.

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