Lifestyle: One Man’s Audacious Plan To Change The Way The World Drives

The solution was to get rid of them. Not just some, and not just by substituting hybrids or flex fuels. The internal combustion engine had to be retired. The future was in electric cars.

This was hardly an original insight; electric cars had been the future for over 100 years. But oil, in the end, supplanted volts on American highways because of one perennial problem: batteries. Car batteries, then and now, are heavy and expensive, don’t last long, and take forever to recharge. In five minutes you can fill a car with enough gas to go 300 miles, but five minutes of charging at home gets you only about 8 miles in an electric car. Clever tricks, like adding “range extenders”—gas engines that kick in when a battery dies—end up making the cars too expensive.

One Man’s Audacious Plan to Change the Way the World Drives (230diggs) Shai Agassi is the man behind the future of electric cars. AutoOS, the Better Place operating system, will transform the transportation grid.

Oil on one hand is polluting the land, and on the other hand it’s financing terror. They say jokingly that the Middle East is divided into these kind of countries: the oily countries and the holy countries. 4

Previous candidates for president have presented their biography and tried to spin it to their advantage, but few have focused so much on their own personal background. For example, John F Kennedy, with whom Obama is often compared, wrote Profiles in Courage (1956) before he was elected, but that book was primarily about other politicians who took a stand, rather than himself (even though Kennedy was obviously hoping readers would place him in a similar light). 5