Prior to his current “mission”, Shai Agassi, age 38,worked for SAP, the world’s largest maker of enterprise software.  Agassi believes it just might be possible to get the entire world off oil. For good.  The problem, he decided, was oil-consuming, CO2-spewing cars. The solution was to get rid of them. Not just some, and not just by substituting hybrids or flex fuels. No half measures. The internal combustion engine had to be retired. The future was in electric cars, but then their is the sticky problem of batteries than can sustain an extended driving range.

Agassi reimagined the entire automotive ecosystem by proposing a new concept he called the Electric Recharge Grid Operator. It was an unorthodox mashup of the automotive and mobile phone industries. Instead of gas stations on every corner, the ERGO would blanket a country with a network of “smart” charge spots. Drivers could plug in anywhere, anytime, and would subscribe to a specific plan – unlimited miles, a maximum number of miles each month, or pay as you go – all for less than the equivalent cost for gas. They’d buy their car from the operator, who would offer steep discounts, perhaps even give the cars away. The profit would come from selling electricity – the minutes. 

There would be plugs in homes, offices, shopping malls. And when customers couldn’t wait to “fill up,” they’d go to battery exchange stations where they would pull into car-wash-like sheds, and in a few minutes, a hydraulic lift would swap the depleted battery with a fresh one. Drivers wouldn’t pay a penny extra: The ERGO would own the battery.

In 2007, Agassi quit his job at SAP. Many of Agassi’s colleagues from SAP joined him. They realized that what Shai was building was still essentially a software company. He needed a network that allowed cars to tell the grid how much charge they were carrying and how much more they required. The system had to know where the car was so it could tell the driver where to go to “fill up.” And it had to electronically negotiate with the local energy utility over when it could and couldn’t take power and how much to pay.

“For the car companies, we made it simple,” he says. “We separated the ownership of the car and the ownership of the battery. See, car companies don’t know how to assess the life of the battery. So they go through these complicated programs of testing them for a long period of time. And we told the car company, you know what? Just like you don’t sell a car with a card that says ‘Here is oil for the life of the car,’ you don’t sell cars with the batteries for the life of the car, because the battery is crude oil.”

Right now Agassi has a lot of venture capital, a company called “Better Place”, and an interest from the leaders of countries all over the world (not the U.S., of course).  It’s a novel and interesting idea.  Let’s keep our fingers crossed that this one might be the one to make it through the gauntlet.