Mygreenwheels

Here are two organisations who look to me like they might just be aiming for success in the electric car market and for totally different reasons. One of them hails from Silicon Valley and adopts a typically left field approach to the sector while the other is a mainstream automotive player taking the opposite approach. One of them has an hourly R&D budget of ... $1 million. I'll let you guess which one that is.

The littler of the two isn't doing too badly in the $ stakes according to reports. Shai Agassi is a former top exec from SAP who has raised $200 million for his start-up, Project Better Place. His new business will lease removable batteries for electric cars and will also build a network of battery charging stations and replacement centres across the US, Europe and the developing world. The way Agassi explains it is "We’re basically saying this is just like the cellular phone model. If you think of Tesla as the iPhone, we’re AT&T.”

He's aiming to begin commercial sales and service in two years and is looking to obtain commitments from both governments and carmakers. Even with existing lithium-ion technology, the new venture is claimed to be viable. “It’s much easier to transport electrons than octane molecules,” he said. “We’ve already got a grid that goes around the entire world; all we have to do is extend it.”

Now that's a great idea. I'm sure he's on a winner there.

The other item that caught my eye this week was Bill Moore's report from Japan where he interviewed the big boss-san of Toyota. As you've no doubt worked out, they're the guys with the $1m-per-hour R&D budget, but even with that astonishing resource they still won't give a date or model year for when we can expect to see Toyota-manufactured li-ion batteries in their full-hybrid cars. You might wonder why they don't just go and do a deal with 3rd parties as GM have done, but that's not the Toyota way. They prefer to keep the R&D in house in order to build their knowledge base on a particular technology, even with its setbacks and dead-ends, and ultimately be able to improve the quality of that technology.

Top of the Toyota agenda are apparently vehicle safety, energy availability and the environment. Why does that sound believable coming from them and not if it comes from someone like GM? With that level of determination behind them it's hard to see how Toyota could fail to deliver a real electric car (or a high performance hybrid), even if we have to wait a while for it.