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IT'S a Friday night, about 6 o'clock, sometime in July 2029. Arriving home from work, you pull your electric car into your suburban Melbourne driveway. Automatic sensors lift the garage door. The purr of a Ferrari 250 GTO California comes not from under the bonnet but from the car's hard drive, having been downloaded so your ride doesn't sound like a golf cart. It shuts down as you pull the key from the ignition.
You yank the car's cable from its jack, plug it into a waist-high stand resembling a parking meter in the corner of the garage and head inside to greet your family. About the same time, a friend pulls her car into the kerb outside her inner-suburban apartment and uses a streetside plug-in point similar to the one in your garage. Across the city, people heading out for dinner, a drink or a show use plug-in points in public car parks.
The next morning you're preparing for a weekend in the country. Your car's 250-litre lithium-ion battery, which sits behind the back seat, is fully charged and its four motors — one hidden behind each wheel — are primed to go. The battery didn't charge immediately, but was placed in a queue for access to the electricity grid by a piece of software that assesses how much juice was left and the most likely time, based on previous experience, when you would next be driving. So, it's not until 2am, long after the peak hours for electricity use, that electrons start feeding into your machine.
By spreading out the charging process across the country, the electric car fleet does not overload the grid, which now runs more than 25 per cent on renewable energy. About 10 per cent of the clean infrastructure, mostly wind farms, has been specially built to run the car network.
Your drive is long. After about 300 kilometres the car battery is nearly shot, so you pull into a swap station. You park over a pit, and a robotic exchange system pulls out your depleted battery and inserts a charged replacement. The whole process takes less than a minute. The depleted battery is then recharged, ready to give life to another car.
Out on the road, all the new cars you drive past are electric. There are petrol cars, but they are outdated and no longer cost effective. With oil in desperately short supply and the electric alternative taking over, few old-style petrol stations remain. A University of California, Berkeley, study two decades earlier has proven true — that 64 per cent of car sales in America would be electric.
In Australia, the take-up rate has been faster. Back in 2009, research claimed a third of people would consider buying an electric car as their next vehicle. No one believed it at the time. Maybe they should have.
If this future vignette of a revolutionised car industry sounds like the self-serving spin of someone trying to sell you something, it is. It is the story that was told across Australia this week by Shai Agassi, the 41-year-old former software entrepeneur and founder of sustainable transport infrastructure company Better Place. In May — just two years after he quit business software company SAP on the verge of becoming chief executive to pursue a vision of making the world a better place — Time magazine included him on its annual list of the world's 100 most influential people. Last night he was named international environmentalist of the year at Australia's annual Banksia awards.
External assessments of the Agassi vision — embraced with equal vigour by Better Place's Australian chief, former Brumby Government MP Evan Thornley — range from ambitious to fantasy. Agassi says it is inevitable. He says the basic question is: how, in a world where you have to pay to emit greenhouse gas and oil is increasingly scarce, would you get an entire country to run without petrol? His answer: start with the infrastructure. "You have to think from the solution backwards — imagine the future then engineer towards it," he says. Continued…
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