Electric range anxiety and Big Brother

October 16, 2012 - 1:06 PM by

Unrolling our new Better Place 100% electric car

We picked up our brand new 100% electric car from Better Place on Sunday. Being an early adopter has its perks – when we walked into Better Place’s showroom, the entire staff stood up and applauded. There was a big screen reading “Mazel Tov Brian and Jody Blum.” We were given our own special license plate (with “392” on it – indicating more or less what number car purchase we were). And the cookies and juice weren’t bad either.

The electric Renault Fluence that Better Place sells is as much a computer as a vehicle. Our subsequent “training” session lasted nearly two hours and we were invited to stop by again in a month for a refresher session.

The centerpiece of the Better Place Fluence is called OSCAR (“operating system” for “cars,” I’m guessing), which controls everything from the entertainment system to the GPS navigation and location of the next battery swap station.

The latter is particularly important: if you input your route (and you’re strongly recommended to), OSCAR will calculate how long your battery will last and if and when you’ll need to stop to get a fresh one. For example, if you enter a trip from Jerusalem to Karmiel, then to Tiberius and back home again, OSCAR will automatically insert the closest swap stops at various points during the trip and even modify your route to make sure there’s a station along the way. It’s really quite ingenious.

The car “learns” your driving behaviors, too, to adjust when it thinks you’ll need to swap. Speed demons will drain the battery faster, as will climbing up a hill. Going down recharges the battery. There’s cruise control (steady driving improves battery life) and a speed limiter. Every driver gets his or her own “log-in” so that OSCAR will know the difference between Jody and my driving habits.

After training, photo, and more cookies, we headed back to Jerusalem from the Better Place headquarters in Herzliya with 97% battery left. OSCAR told us which way to go and if we followed his (or her?) instructions (OSCAR speaks with a woman’s voice), we’d arrive home with 29% battery left. A nice comfortable journey We’d then plug in to our home charging spot overnight and the battery would be back at 100% in 7-8 hours.

Except that we didn’t follow OSCAR’s instructions exactly. First we took a slight detour to visit a sporting goods store nearby. Then, although OSCAR wanted us to drive home via the Ayalon, Waze (my iPhone’s GPS best friend) suggested going via Highway 6 would be faster. When we got back to Jerusalem, OSCAR plotted us through the center of town, but I know that taking Highway 9 and looping down the Begin Highway is generally quicker.

All good decisions as far as travel time goes. But each option added a few kilometers. And I didn’t always stick to 100 km/hour. Plus, there’s a really big hill coming into Jerusalem. Our % battery remaining was dropping faster than we expected. And the swap station in Jerusalem isn’t open yet.

As we were rounding Har Hotzvim, already in the city limits. OSCAR started beeping frantically. Red warning lights splashed across his (or her) face. We had just passed the 10% left threshold. And, according to OSCAR, we didn’t have enough juice to make it home.

And then the phone rang. It was Better Place Customer Service. They had received an alert that we getting too low on power. Where were we, the Better Place representative asked?

Jody began relaying instructions. “Drive slower. And watch the charge indicator.” If I kept it slow and steady, the car would recharge ever so slightly and we might just make it.

“Would you like us to monitor you on the rest of your ride home,” the Better Place lady asked. Yes please!

The next 10 minutes were far more nerve wracking than I’d expected on our first day out. The battery monitor continued to drop. 4%. 3%. 1%. And then 0. The “battery empty” icon flashed, just like it would on your laptop. Except this was a very heavy laptop. We were opposite the gas station at Oranim Junction, no more than a minute from our apartment.

If the car went kaput, would we even know it? After all, the 100% electric Fluence is completely silent when not moving. How ironic if we were to run out of energy directly opposite a gas station which would do us no good.

Our hearts were racing. But OSCAR nudged us a bit further and we made it into our parking spot, plugged in the charging cable and finally exhaled. The truth is, we knew that, even on empty, the car can usually drive another 7 kilometers. But that didn’t particularly calm us. Red flashing lights will do that.

Better Place’s Customer Service was uniformly excellent. They “know” us and address us by our first names…in English (our preferences are recorded in the computer). Still, there is something eerie about the fact that Big Brother Better Place is tracking you. And yet, if you can get past the privacy issues, it is also incredibly comforting to know that you have a caring partner watching out for you.

Despite our harrowing first day, I have no complaints. It’s all part of the learning curve – just like if you switched from a PC to a Mac. Once OSCAR has internalized how many kilometers I really get, hills, speed and all, it should prevent recurrences. And because you don’t “own” the battery, whenever the technology is improved, you get the “upgrades” automatically. Better Place says the range will extend 7-10% a year. Also, just this morning, Better Place sent an email to tell us that the swap station at Hemed – on the Jerusalem-Tel Aviv Highway – is now open.

Moreover, the Fluence rides likes a dream – smooth, silent. It’s roomy and you sit really high up given this is a sedan and not an SUV. There are all kinds of nice touches (the speaker phone automatically pairs with your cell phone via Bluetooth; there are sun shades in the back seats).

But if there is one lesson learned so far it’s: Listen to OSCAR when s/he tells you which way to go. Big Brother sometimes does know best.

There’s more on our Better Place adventures in this previous post.

Tags: • Category: Environment, Technology 

Comments

12 Comments on Electric range anxiety and Big Brother

  1. Richie Sevrinsky on Tue, Oct 16th 2012 1:33 PM

    2. Thanks for the post – you have definitely cured me of any dreams I may have had of making the change to electric. Until battery life is significantly improved, there’s no way a Better Place car could support my Bet Shemesh – Ramat Hachayal commute.

  2. Kelli Brown on Tue, Oct 16th 2012 1:52 PM

    3. I’m trying to wrap my head around this.
    So you drove one way from Herzliya to Jlem and with some small deviations you barely made it home?
    If you tried to drive into Tel Aviv for a concert, you’d have to either stop before you went back to swap the battery or find a charging point while at the concert?
    If I have to commute from Modiin to Kfar Saba for a meeting, I’d have to swap the battery before I could come home?
    I understand that people are using the idea of battery swaps the same way that we currently fill up at a gas station, but wouldn’t you need to swap on almost every major trip? Am I missing something here?

  3. Dave Egyes on Tue, Oct 16th 2012 5:43 PM

    4. Kudos to you both on going where so few have yet ventured!

  4. Electric Range Anxiety and Big Brother on Wed, Oct 17th 2012 8:13 AM

    5. [...] I told the story of our new car first on Israelity. [...]

  5. Moshe Teren on Wed, Oct 17th 2012 7:23 PM

    6. Brian, Great story. Tell us more about the drive itself. Max speed? How’s climate control? Audio system, Cornering, etc…?
    It sounds like an early rollout still. Are they ready for the critical masses?

  6. Warren Burstein on Fri, Oct 19th 2012 2:04 PM

    7. I’m hoping that by the time my car earns one of those “collectable” license plates they’ll have the kinks worked out (and the prices lower). I’m always happen to let someone else beta test.

    I’d have to wait for a swap station because I don’t have a private parking space. Thanks for that, Jerusalem Municipality, which seized my building’s parking lot and later sold it to another developer whose project has underground parking and took more parking spaces off my street.

  7. Getting on the open road | ISRAELITY on Wed, Oct 24th 2012 4:40 PM

    8. [...] not even talking about the futuristic opportunity of buying a fully electric Better Place car like Brian did (which I recently rode in and felt… well, [...]

  8. Nicky on Tue, Oct 30th 2012 10:21 AM

    9. I must admit that though I’ve always wanted an electric car, this does put me off.

    It sounds as if you have to be so organized in your thinking before you use the car – planning routes around what’s best for the battery not for you, planning how much you use the car at one go. Doing one journey, and then stopping to let the car charge for hours.

    There doesn’t seem to be room for spontaneity, or the organized chaos of a human life.

  9. David Rose on Thu, Nov 1st 2012 10:44 AM

    10. Now a word to all the doubters, after being one of the first private customers since 4/2012 and driven over 22K km, Brian’s story is pretty much par for the course, i.e. the wonderful service that you receive from Better Place, the smooth silent drive and yes, you have to be a thinking person to drive this car. The “kinks” are not really “kinks”, they are perceptions that people have prior to experiencing the Renault Fluence ZE and what the gasoline companies would like you to think, so they can keep on emptying your pockets! More power to you if you want to let them continue, I laugh every time I drive past a gas station. As Brian himself noted, anyone today making the drive he did would not reach a 0% battery because they today have the option of switching to a full battery in under 5 min. at at least 3 switching stations. To Brian and Jody, welcome to the nicest “mafia” in the country!

  10. David Rose on Thu, Nov 1st 2012 10:49 AM

    11. Furthermore, anyone really wishing to learn how they can fit a Better Place Renault Fluence ZE into their life style is free to contact me through Facebook or email at davidpaulrose AT gmail Dot com.

  11. Oscar the Grouch on Sat, Nov 3rd 2012 6:56 PM

    12. [...] After we entered in our itinerary, OSCAR recommended that we swap batteries on the way. Fine, we didn’t want a repeat of our near-battery depletion experience on our first day out. OSCAR’s suggestion was the [...]

  12. Joseph Wiesner on Sun, Nov 4th 2012 8:34 AM

    13. Looks like you are ahead of the curve. Electric cars are the way of the future. This has been said before, but now we are really getting there. Technology is constantly improving battery longevity and in a relatively small country like Eretz Israel this is really a big plus. COST is what will drive the “critical mass” toward the desirability of owning the all electric car. I would love to see the day (hopefully in our lifetime) when the world will be able to tell the arabs and OPEC to go DRINK their black gold.

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