Better Place is a venture-backed American-Israeli company based in Palo Alto, California that aims to reduce global dependency on petroleum through the creation of a market-based transportation infrastructure that supports electric vehicles.
Shai Agassi’s vision was inspired by a question asked by Klaus Schwab at the 2005 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland: “How do you make the world a better place?”
Better Place is building its first electric vehicle network in Israel, and among its partners has selected Denmark and Hawaii as the other two test markets due to their small size.Denmark and Israel have enacted policies, which create a tax differential between zero-emission vehicles and traditional cars, to accelerate the transition to electric cars. Better Place plans to deploy the infrastructure on a country-by-country basis with initial deployments and commercial sales in Denmark and Israel. The company is in talks with more than 25 additional regions around the world.