[ MUSIC ] We're speaking with Shai Agassi who is the Founder and CEO of A Better Place, an electric car company although Shai likes to say that they're not a car company. Explain exactly what A Better Place is for our viewers. A Better Place, if you want to take the analogy with the mobile phone industry. We're, we're AT & T, we're not we don't make the car, we put the network that makes electric cars more convenient and more affordable for consumers to drive than gasoline cars. You've had quite a three- year run for the company and most recently you've really turned the corner on your business plan. You now have a car manufacturer partner, a major OEF, that is signed on to work with you. Tell us a little bit about the deal you recently signed with Renault. Yes we've just announced what I would say the historic event whether Renault last week it at the Frankfurt motor show, Renault has put together a beautiful line up of cars. The first one of them is is hitting the market in in mid 2011. It's called a Renault Fluence and it's an electric car with a switchable battery that allows us to actually drive the car and switch the battery keep going in, in less than minute. So it's it's a very fast extension if you want the range of the battery. Renault's taking it to production and tooling for mass, mass, mass production for the first time on any electric car in history. And we put in an order for 100, 000 cars on that car to sell in the first two countries we're in: Israel and Denmark. And there's never been an order of that magnitude on any electric car. And you're, you're assuming the upfront costs of the order, and then taking ownership of those vehicles. We're actually, in Israel we will be the conduit for the car. In Denmark, they're gonna sell through their dealership network, but we're in effect we're the, demand generators. So, signing up this relationship with Renault, that, that was so critical because I think up until then a lot of the skeptics had said this can't work until you partner with a major car manufacturer. But we we've announced the partnership with Renault early 08, January of 08. Still most people didn't see the car and they didn't know what we were building and they didn't know whether it would be high volume or low volume and so the skepticism right it's more like denial than skepticism I would say. When we said it's gonna be high volume, people say, yeah, sure, we'll see that. And then we said it's gonna be a fun car, and they say, oh, yeah, we've heard that before. As we started to prove, over the last two years every single milestone that we, we hit, that we have charge spots, and we have the software, and we showed the switching of the battery. And now with the, with the demonstration of the car the skepticism is going away. And there's a general sense I believe now that it's inevitable, that this will happen. Israel will happen, Denmark will happen, and with it volumes happen. And once volumes happen there's no way to stop this car from going anywhere around the world. Talk a little bit about the software. Your background, of course, is you were an executive at SAP, a global software company. And the software as you've described it to me is, is essential to not only making your network work, but also for the vehicles to be able to perform the way you need them to as part of the network. So explain the, the software development process and exactly why it's so critical to the entire chain that you just described. I think it's, it's, it's a great, again, it's the difference between what we've done and most other people have done. When you think of a single car, you don't really worry about what happens when I come home and plug in. Right? Am I going to make a big difference? Like plugging in your refrigerator or your washing machine and it's got four wheels. But what happens when the entire neighborhood or an entire country comes home at five o'clock in the afternoon and plugs in? How do you deal with that problem? And what we found out with studies with the Israel utility but also with the Danish utilities is that. If all cars come in at eight o'clock in the morning to the parking lot at work and at five o'clock in the afternoon, the parking lots and the two car garages you have at home and we're supposed to serve them immediately on that spot. You need to build 50 % more generation capacity on the grid and 50 % more transmission capacity on the grid, which is super expensive. And that capacity will be used for about an hour. If, on the other hand, you know how to sort all these cars in a queue and decide who gets to charge now and who gets to charge later. And push a lot of the charging to off peak hours. You don't need to touch the grids, it's great. And that, that difference is so stark I mean, we're talking billions of dollars difference in, in in infrastructure costs. And a way to do it is, is by understanding the driver and the driving behavior of of this particular car with this particular person. If you come into the Fortune building in the morning, and I assume in New York, most people don't drive to work in the morning but if you drove into a building in California and you parked there, we know it's work. You've been here, you know, every morning for the last year and so we assume it's work. We know that when you come to work, you don't leave until six o'clock in the afternoon. That's your pattern. And as a result of that, you get a certain place in queue. Mm- hm. You come home, same thing. Only on Tuesdays, you actually leave at lunch, and in the evening you go somewhere for two hours. We don't know what that somewhere is, but you go there for two hours and that driving pattern remains inside your computer. Now it doesn't come to us. We don't know anything about you. There's no big brother. It stays in your computer. The only thing it does is it allows us to predict how much do you need and when do you need it.

Better Place CEO Shai Agassi says his company\'s deal with Renault will create the first electric car with a changeable battery.

Renault powers up electric cars