What will Electric Automobiles and Mobile Phones have in Common?

Los Angeles, California ,USA -- The GreenMonster is shopping for a green car that uses renewable energy that will complement his good looks, his will to emit lesser and lesser, if not zero, pollution, gain energy efficiency, and independence, not just on the road, but from fossil fuels as well.

A company called BETTER PLACE, with Shai Agassi as its founder and CEO, gears itself to provide an electric car infrastructure or network, in places powered by renewable energy, where people can affordably and conveniently charge or switch batteries -- to free us from expensive fossil fuels.

The BETTER PLACE business model is like that of cellular networks and mobile phones. We pay cellular network providers for minute-by-minute access to cell towers connected together in cellular networks. We buy the mobile phone we want or sometimes it's thrown in for free depending on the mobile phone service's subscription plan we choose.

We just replace the phone with an electric car, replace the cell towers with battery recharge stations, and replace the cellular networks with an electric recharge grid powered by renewable energy. And now we’re buying miles, not minutes.

If and when this electric car infrastructure holds ground, I imagine car manufacturers mass producing their Motorolas, Nokias, and Sony Ericssons at cheap prices and maybe at even much cheaper prices for the end-users by getting financial incentives from the electric car infrastructure provider or from the government to drive more users or drivers to the network.

Within their proposed infrastructure is the BETTER PLACE operating system which they call AutOS, which has GPS and power monitor that communicates between the car, the battery, and the grid to guide drivers to the nearest charging station and to manage the electricity the car needs.

I think that this is a liberating idea and a business model that would go a long long way. Israel, Denmark, Australia, California, Hawaii and Canada are some of the governments that made commitments to the installation of this grid.