The Road to the Future is Electric...For Now // 11.21.2008 at 10:49 AM

Categories: Alternative Energy, Business Innovations in Sustainability, Social Responsibility

It's almost a decade into the new century and I must admit that I am feeling a bit let-down. I know this sounds silly but I sort of thought the future would have looked a little more...future-y. I mean where's my virtual reality machine, my robot servant, and my flying car?

Well, anyone who's played a Wii can vouch for its near virtual reality effect (I got tennis elbow from playing Wii Tennis!) and there are robots that sweep your floor and dance to your playlists (iRoomba and iDog respectively), but what about that flying car? Unfortunately, that part of the future isn't here yet, but there is something almost as high tech, and it's much more environmentally friendly than our current gas-guzzling vehicles -- electric cars.

However, a future traversed with electric cars has been slow in coming. The cars are out there but not nearly as many as there ought to be. Mainly because the infrastructure doesn't currently exist to support widespread use. But that is about to change.

Better Place, a start-up company out of Palo Alto, CA, has recently announced plans to build a $1 Billion electric car network in the Bay Area. The company hopes to obtain all city permits by the end of the year and begin rolling out its infrastructure in 2010. They also plan to rollout the same model in Israel, Australia, and Denmark.

Better Place aims to provide public charging stations and a place to swap out leased batteries. The mayors of San Jose, San Francisco, and Oakland are also pushing the initiative as well, offering incentives for businesses and garages that install the car-chargers. Hopefully, this will encourage other cities to follow suit.

It's great to see businesses and governments working together to find a solution to our current environmental crisis. Moving away from our dependency on oil is definitely a step in the right direction. Now, if they can just make that electric car fly.