Better Place Extends Japanese Taxi Program, but Still Lacks an Automaker Partner

(MoneyWatch)  In April the electric-vehicle charging company, Better Place, which became a media darling after its charismatic founder Shai Agassi said he wanted to wire the world, launched an ambitious pilot program in Japan. It built a fleet of four taxis and linked them to the company's battery switching hardware, then, in cooperation with the Japanese government, it turned them loose on the streets of Tokyo.

Now, a month after the program was suspended, Better Place is bringing it back until the end of the year. The ultimate goal is to make it a large-scale commercial operation for Japanese cities, but for that Better Place will have to find a willing automaker to produce Japanese-market EVs with switchable battery packs. So far, only Renault is doing that (in partnership with Better Place in Israel).

Switchable batteries are at the heart of Better Place's plans, and the company makes a strong case that alternatives such as 30-minute fast charging are problematic. Better Place's plan to wire Israel uses new Renault Fluence cars, with both switchable batteries and standard charging ports. Better Place has ordered a whopping 100,000 of them (also to be used in Denmark), and the first 50 to 100 will be on the road in Israel by the end of this year. The company is also trying to convince other automakers to go the switchable route.

Kiyotaka Fujii, president of Better Place Japan, said in an interview Thursday night that the Tokyo test program has been successful, with more than 3,000 passengers carried, 40,000 kilometers traveled, and 2,122 battery switches without problems. Battery switching works, Fujii said, and the company is looking at making its test program permanent.

"Absolutely, we want to make it a commercial operation," he said. "We are approaching carmakers, and they say they're very interested." The logical candidate would be Toyota, which makes many of Tokyo's 55,000 taxis (as many as London, Paris and New York combined). But Toyota doesn't, at least right now, have switchable battery EVs. Fujii said the company envisioned a fleet of 10,000 cars for Tokyo alone, so that big an order might energize automakers.

One issue is that switching stations are large and Tokyo is notoriously space-restricted. But Fujii said that the capital city has 120 stations that refuel taxis with LPG gas, and that their operators were looking to update to something more modern. "Space is not an issue," he said.

Fujii also said that several other Japanese cities have approached Better Place wanting EV fleets, but Better Place can't accommodate all of them. "It's a bandwidth issue," he said. "We're a small company."

Fujii said that taxi drivers in the pilot program loved battery switching, and the quiet operation "put customers in a good mood." He also said that because the Nissan vehicles in the program have relatively small 16-kilowatt-hour battery packs, they had to swap something like five times a day. The goal is to switch twice a day. Although the swapping process takes only 59 seconds, the need to return to the station through congested traffic (which Tokyo has in spades) is a burden on drivers who make money only when they're carrying fares.

The Tokyo Taxi experiment has been dark in August as maintenance is performed. They resume again September 1. Extending until the end of the year, said Fujii, "will give us further insight into the battery performance and durability of switch stations. That will be invaluable as we move toward commercial launch later next year in Israel and Denmark."

Meanwhile, Fujii will be looking for an automaker who wants to build EVs with switchable batteries.

Related:

• Better Place's Tokyo Battery Swap: A Test to Show the World