Better Place was at one time an icon for the future of electric vehicles and cutting edge, innovative technologies. Its battery swapping technology was supposed to take away the long-charging time that was hurting adoption of plug-in vehicles.
Better Place filed for bankruptcy in late May in Israel.
While its seeing a lot of installations in China and has its supporters, dont expect to see other startups pursuing battery swapping infrastructure.
Dallas Kachan, managing partner of cleantech research firm Kachan & Co. thinks batteries that stay in the cars will win these batteries continue to get better.
Expensive custom robots removing and replacing car batteries didnt seem to make sense when batteries have been constantly getting faster to charge and holding larger and larger charges, Kachan says
Things started to look bad for the company last fall when near-legendary founder Shai Agassi left the company and then in January when CEO Evan Thornley left.
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