crazy about automobiles

TOKYO: For all the feel-good rhetoric about electric cars, the inconvenient truth is that drivers remain sceptical of battery technology that can carry them only 160 kilometres at a time.
However, an entrepreneurial venture to introduce a network of battery switching stations, introduced on a trial basis in Tokyo yesterday and due for Australia next year, may allay those doubts for some.
The pilot program between the Silicon Valley company Better Place and Nihon Kotsu, Tokyo's largest taxi company, is the first test of the technology before it is introduced in Israel and Denmark next year.

Better Place will begin building infrastructure in Canberra next year and the rest of the country in 2012.
It envisages a global network of thousands of charging points for short trips and battery-switching stations for motorists making longer journeys. These are needed to deal with the limitations of lithium-ion batteries, which have a short life and take several hours to recharge.
The founder of Better Place, the Israeli-American Shai Agassi, said the Tokyo trial was "the proof that you can build a network of [electric] cars that can go and go and go … That would not have been possible if you had to drive for one hour then charge [an electric battery] for six hours."
For the Tokyo program, four electric taxis serving the Roppongi Hills neighbourhood will rely on robots at a $US500,000 ($540,000) switching station to swap dead batteries for fresh ones in less than half the time it takes to fill a tank of petrol.
The 90-day trial is the ideal litmus test, said the president of Nihon Kotsu, Ichiro Kawanabe, because Tokyo's 60,000-strong taxi fleet is the largest in the world. ''Even though it only makes up 2 per cent of Japan's cars, it accounts for 20 per cent of emissions," he said.
The chief executive of Better Place Australia, Evan Thornley, a former Victorian Labor MP who quit politics for his latest post, said Australia's urban environment made it ideal for electric cars: "We have a lot of large cars that do long distances driving around the outer suburbs."
Better Place Australia is working with Macquarie Group to raise $1 billion to cover working capital and fund the network.
It has an agreement with AGL to supply renewable energy but expects to work with all the renewable energy providers.