Electric Cars Down in Australia

A new partnership between American company Better Place and the Australian AGL Energy seeks to bring the electric car and the infrastructure needed to operate it in Australia. The plan is to open a series of “electric highways” for 0 emission vehicles with the support of the Australian government.

The Better Place company is not at the first venture of this kind, previously having worked with Israel and Denmark, but Australia remains the biggest country so far. Australia is currently the sixth biggest country in the world and the seventh “car nation”. The point is to demonstrate that the project is viable even in countries this big: “you can actually take sustainable transportation to any size” said CEO and funder of Better Place.

The project seeks to turn Brisbane, Sydney and Merlbourne as network hubs and link them through electric highways which would imply building battery switch stations along the routes to enable drivers to swap depleted batteries.

Making the system work here will open up new opportunities in the United Stated and the United Kingdom. “If it can be done between Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne, you can see the same thing happening between LA, the San Francisco Bay Area, all the way up to the Seattle region” added the CEO.

Better Place seeks to raise one billion Australian dollars (670 million American dollars) for the infrastructure that representatives say is paramount in switching to clean energy: “The ability to drive a car is not limited by the battery or the race of the car, it's limited by the range of deployed of the infrastructure”.

Tests will begin in 2009 and will be officially launched in Denmark and Israel in 2011, to be later implemented in Australia. The latest date predicted for Australia is 2012.