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Project Better Place, owned by Israeli-American entrepreneur Shai Agassi, will provide lithium-ion batteries to power the cars and the infrastructure to refresh or replace them. One battery will enable the cars to travel 124 miles per charge. Project Better Place will install parking meter-like plugs on city streets and construct service stations along highways to replace the batteries. [2] Renault-Nissan will build the new cars and will offer a small number of their existing electric models, such as the “Megane” sedan, at prices roughly comparable to gasoline models.



To promote this form of environmentally efficient transportation, the Israeli government cut the tax rate on cars powered by electricity to 10 percent (from 79 percent on ordinary cars) to encourage consumers to buy the vehicles once they become available. [3] This initiative will offer consumers an inexpensive car for which they will pay a monthly fee based on expected mileage.

A new approach to selling and recharging electric cars could overcome some of the basic issues that have kept them from being widely adopted. A startup called Project Better Place, which had the largest of any venture-funding round in 2007, raising $200 million, recently announced plans to install recharging infrastructure in Israel and Denmark and to sell electric cars using a business model much like that used today with cell phones.

A small internal combustion engine, a start/stop function and regenerative braking all help to reduce fuel consumption in hybrid drive systems. But Dr. Peter Rieth denies that they also make a vehicle less fun to drive. In this ATZautotechnolgy interview, the head of Systems & Technology at Continental's Chassis & Safety Division talks about electronic brakes, rear-wheel steering, the networking of active and passive safety and further trends.

There’s a full-blown fight in San Diego between common sense and enviro extremists over a new San Diego Gas & Electric power line called the Sunrise Powerlink… a project thats been winding its way through the state approval process for more than two years.

Energy (national power grid) is a D