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-- Driven: Shai Agassi's Audacious Plan to Put Electric Cars on the Road
Driven: Shai Agassi's Audacious Plan to Put Electric Cars on the Road
An article in this months Wired that I thought some of you would enjoy. It is a bit long for c0r standards, but tough shit. This is only the first page.
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| Shai Agassi looks up and down the massive rectangular table in the Ritz-Carlton ballroom and begins to worry. He knows he's out of his league here. For the last day and a half, he's been listening to an elite corps of Israeli and US politicians, businesspeople, and intellectuals debate the state of the world. Agassi is just one of 60 sequestered in a Washington, DC, hotel for a conference run by the Saban Center for Middle East Policy. Among the participants: Bill Clinton, former Israeli prime minister Shimon Peres, Supreme Court justice Stephen Breyer, and two past directors of the CIA. It's December 2006. Scheduled to speak in a few minutes, Agassi gets nudged by the Israeli minister of education: "Be optimistic," she tells him. "We've got to close with an upbeat tone." Agassi thanks her. Optimism won't be a problem. At 38, Agassi is the youngest invitee. Just after the dotcom boom, SAP, the world's largest maker of enterprise software, paid $400 million for a small-business software company he started with his father; now he's SAP's head of products and widely presumed to be the next CEO. But he's not here this morning to talk about business software. Instead, his topic will be the world's addiction to fossil fuels. It's a recent passion and the organizers invited him to counterbalance the man speaking now, Daniel Yergin, the famed energy consultant and oil industry analyst. Yergin gives them his latest thinking: Energy independence is unattainable. Oil consumption will continue to rise. Iran will get richer. It's not exactly what this audience wants to hear. Now it's Agassi's turn. He starts off uncharacteristically nervous, stammering a bit. He's got something different, he says. A new approach. He believes it just might be possible to get the entire world off oil. For good. Point by point, gaining speed as he goes, he shares for the first time in public the ideas that will change his future�and possibly the world's. Agassi has dark hair, light brown eyes, and a square jaw. He's a careful speaker, holding back until the right moment before delivering his thoughts. He's partial to dramatic pauses, especially if he's about to explain how the future is going to look�something he does all the time. People often think he's kidding, partly because he always has a slight, wry smile. But when the pause ends, what follows�no matter how far-fetched�is never a joke. At his first executive board meeting at SAP, a company that had grown dominant by moving slowly and conservatively, Agassi suggested nearly a dozen heretical ideas. He said SAP should give away its hardware and software for free�just charge for IT support. He said SAP should make its database business open source to undermine Oracle. The other board members laughed: The new kid was a cutup! But they stopped when SAP cofounder Hasso Plattner looked around the table and said, "He's the only guy making sense here." Agassi's interest in energy is new. In 2005, he joined Young Global Leaders, an invitation-only group for politicians and businesspeople under 40. The four-day induction seminar was held at the Swiss ski resort of Zermatt. Between lectures, YGLs like Skype cofounder Niklas Zennstr�m and NBA star Dikembe Mutombo pledged to find ways to "make the world a better place" by 2020. Agassi's assignment was the environment, and he quickly focused in on climate change. Most left the event and just poked around in their own industries, looking for small tweaks and improvements. But Agassi wanted something bigger. Back home in Silicon Valley, his day job involved coaxing SAP into the Web 2.0 era. But after Zermatt, his nights were devoted to dinners with energy experts, books on energy policy, and sessions on Wikipedia, learning everything he could about the carbon economy. Getting off oil was the key, he decided. But how? He started by looking at cutting energy usage in the home, then moved to a more tempting target: transportation. Was hydrogen the answer? What about embedding power in the street�like slot cars? Could more be done with biofuels? Agassi kept a running file on his home PC and began working on a series of white papers. |
I wonder if you can fit a WOO WOO tip on an electric car.
THE WHISTLE GOES WOO
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| Originally posted by nchs09 I wonder if you can fit a WOO WOO tip on an electric car. THE WHISTLE GOES WOO |
Anyone read it?
my dyslexia caused me to think this thread was about degrassi jr high 
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| Originally posted by elFreak my dyslexia caused me to think this thread was about degrassi jr high |
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| Originally posted by gehzumteufel Anyone read it? |
Great article. I hope they really make some progress and show that a model like this is viable. I'd love to see a major shift in energy policy in my lifetime, but I'm 31 and I just don't see it happening. Color me pessimistic.
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| Originally posted by Zoso Great article. I hope they really make some progress and show that a model like this is viable. I'd love to see a major shift in energy policy in my lifetime, but I'm 31 and I just don't see it happening. Color me pessimistic. |
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| Originally posted by gehzumteufel Yeah I have the exact same stance. I see how this could just blow up if they can show it to be quite viable, but I also see how it can fail miserably. |
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| Originally posted by Zoso We in the US seem to resist any sort of radical change. Also, I can only imagine how much money and politics will be thrown at resisting the change from a carbon based economy. You talk about a massive shift of wealth and power! |
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| Originally posted by elFreak my passive reading caused me to think this thread was about andre agassi |
big car companies aren't ready for this or are they?
If any of you is seriously interested in saying to no dependence on fossil fuels you should watch the docu " who killed the electric car ".
Amazing that it's no more know.
I only skimmed tru, but here's a couple of observations:
1. I'm all for the movement towards electric cars but its going to be gradual because its difficult for a number reasons to change infrastructure and the way ppl live their lives. After all we weren't even able to switch over to the metric system while the rest of the world has.
2. I don't understand how electric cars will make us fossil fuel independent. How do you think the majority of electricity is generated at power plants?
3. In addition, no one likes to talk about the environmental impact of the disposal of all those batteries, whether its lead or lithium in our landfills. One has to consider the side effects of using an alternate fuel source before claiming it will be the panacea to our problems. Often you are simply trading one set of problems for another. Look at the effects of using crops to produce ethanol. Food prices have gone up and the net carbon impact of producing it is equal or more than using fossil fuels.
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| Originally posted by Joke Abitch I didn't read the article and need to shut the fuck up till I do |
Well this has expanded to Australia and the US (San Francisco) from its original Israel and follower Denmark. 
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