“So how would you run a whole country without oil? That was the question that sort of hit me in the middle of a Davos afternoon about 4 years ago and it never left my brain, and I started playing with it more like a puzzle. The original thought I had… this must be ethanol so I went out and researched ethanol and found out that you need the amazon in your backyard in every country. About 6 months later I figured out it must be Hydrogen, until some scientists told me the unfortunate truth which is you use more clean electrons… if you use hydrogen so that’s not going to be the path to go… and then sort of through a process of wandering around I got to a thought that actually if you could convert an entire country to electric cars in a way that convenient and affordable you could get to a solution. Now I started from a point of view that it has to be something that scales en masse – how do you do this so that it scales to 99% of the population. The thought that came to mind is that it needs to be as good as any car that you would have today… so 1) it has to be more convenient than a car and 2) it has to be more affordable than today’s cars. And affordable is not a 40 thousand dollar sedan – right – that’s not something that we can buy or finance today and convenient is not something you can drive for an hour and charge for eight. So we are bound the laws of physics and the laws of economics. So how do we do this still within the boundary with the science we know today… how do we do it within economics today, how do we do it from the power of the consumer up and not from the power of an edict down. And on a random visit to Tesla on some afternoon, I actually found out that the answer comes from separating from the car ownership and the battery ownership…. This is the classic “batteries not included”…
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