Israel's Electric Revolution?

A small country running almost entirely on electric cars 10 or 15 years from now and serving as a model for the world? Or the pipedream of an overambitious businessman dragging his government into an expensive boondoggle that may make it the world's laughingstock?

This is a question that Israeli economists are asking this week after a government decision to support, at least on an initial basis, the revolutionary plan of hi-tech entrepreneur Shai Agassi to turn Israel into a pilot project for phasing out the gasoline-powered automobile. It's a question that involves not only the project's feasibility, but also the economic risks that a country like Israel, with its limited resources and pressing needs, can afford to run in the hope of pioneering new technologies or ways of doing things.

Mr. Agassi's plan doesn't so much involve new technologies as it does new ideas for exploiting existing ones. All-electric cars already exist and are produced by a number of manufacturers, although generally for specialized purposes that do not appeal to the mass market in the way that hybrids have begun to.

The reasons for this are obvious. The best-designed electric cars now can travel about 200 kilometers or 120 miles on their batteries without having to recharge them, and recharging a medium-sized car's battery, which weighs some 200 kilograms or 440 pounds, takes approximately three hours. Who, driving from New York to Boston, say, a distance of some 250 miles, is going to want to take a three-hour lunch break while his batteries tank up — and even then not be sure he'll get to his destination before he runs out of current?

Enter the 39-year-old Mr. Agassi, who developed the highly successful Israeli startup TopTier Software and later joined the executive board of SAP AG, a world leader in application and integration systems. Just a minute, he says. In the first place, almost no one in Israel ever has to drive the distance from New York to Boston, since the entire length of the country, from Metulla in the north to Eilat in the south, is no more than that.

And secondly, who says that when an electric car runs out of electricity it has to recharge its battery? Why not simply remove the empty battery and install a full one, which a small crane could do in little more time than it takes to fill a gas tank? The empty battery could then be recharged in the filling station and passed on to another driver later in the day while the first driver is back on the highway in a few minutes.

In a country like America, of course, this too would not be very practical given the current state of electric car art. Many motorists would not want to stop every 120 miles to get a fresh battery even if they could; moreover, since at the outset such a service would be available only in limited areas, it being impossible to dot America instantaneously with electric filling stations that would not be more than 120 miles apart, how many potential customers would even consider buying cars that could not get them to most places?

That's the beauty, according to the Agassi plan, of a tiny country like Israel. With a large but not unfeasible amount of venture capital, it would be possible first to construct enough electric filling stations to ensure that no driver would ever be stuck without one and only then to begin marketing electric cars.

Mr. Agassi claims that 500 such stations would be enough to cover the entire country, that $200 million of seed money has already been promised him by investors, and that several large car manufacturers, such as Renault and Honda, have expressed an interest in turning out cars tailored to the project. All he needs now, he says, is a government pledge to shepherd his plan past the many bureaucratic bodies whose approval would be necessary to implement it. Is it doable? There are many skeptics. Producing all the electricity needed to charge Mr. Agassi's batteries is beyond Israel's capacity, they say — and even if it could be produced, the pollution created by it would offset much of the gain of eliminating gas-powered cars.

Furthermore, the only way to get Israelis to buy electric cars would be to slash their price by cutting taxes on them — and a cheap electric car would then flood Israel's already badly congested road system with hundreds of thousands of new vehicles that it can't handle. Besides which, there are simply too many variables and unknowns that could turn the whole thing into a costly fiasco. It's an interesting idea, the critics say, but let someplace with less problems than Israel's be the guinea pig.

In some ways, it's one more example of a perennial Israeli dilemma. Israel is a country with a very high level of technological creativity and innovation, but once past the planning stage, its innovations have generally been developed by others.

Pioneer Israeli breakthroughs in such areas as agriculture, water technology, desalinization, solar and geothermal heating, and so forth have often found their application and been mass-produced elsewhere because of the smallness of the Israeli market, the obstacles of Israeli bureaucracy, and the reluctance of Israel's governments to commit themselves to experiments with uncertain results.

Now, Mr. Agassi has proposed an experiment that dwarfs any of the others that Israeli innovators have come up with until now. If it succeeds, Israel will have started an environmentally friendly transportation revolution. If it fails, it will have fallen flat on its face.

Singapore, anyone?

Mr. Halkin is a contributing editor of The New York Sun.