Israel Pilots Electric Car Network

An electric transport company is to install thousands of recharging points for electric cars across Israel ready for commercial use by 2011 in the first such nationwide network.

The firm, Better Place, showed off its first charging spot yesterday at a car park above a shopping center in Ramat Hasharon, near Tel Aviv. In a pilot project, it will install 500 of the charging points by the end of this year in cities, including Tel Aviv, Haifa and Jerusalem. It expects to have 500,000 charging points by the time the first cars are marketed.

Moshe Kaplinsky, head of Better Place Israel, said the firm believed it presented a fundamental challenge to petrol-driven cars. "This vision is to stop this addiction to oil," he said.

"The profits of oil, we know where they go," he told a news conference. "Unfortunately a great part of the resources of oil are held by countries that don't share the same values we cherish in the western civilization where we live. The gap is very clear between the price of producing a barrel of oil and the price that it sells for on the world market. And in some places these profits finance terror."

Better Place, which is based in Palo Alto, California, has signed deals for similar electric car networks in San Francisco, Hawaii, Denmark and Australia, but the project in Israel is seen as its pioneer system. The firm has signed agreements with the Israeli government and Renault-Nissan, who will supply the electric cars.

It expects a lithium-ion car battery to last for 106 miles. Given Israel's small size, the company expects relatively little need for changing batteries. A return trip from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv, for example, covers 75 miles. For longer journeys, battery changing stations will be set up across the country and would replace a car battery within minutes.

Payment for the service would be through a monthly account, similar to a mobile phone bill. No prices have been announced, but Kaplinsky said the cost of buying the car and paying for recharging would be less than the costs incurred with petrol-driven cars. "We intend that by 2020 almost all the cars in Israel will be electric vehicles," he said.

The firm was founded last year by a former software executive, Shai Agassi.