Startup shows off electric car planned for Israel

The silver car doing circles in a Tel Aviv parking lot looked like a regular sedan -except it had no exhaust pipe and there was an electric socket where the mouth of the gas tank should have been.

The Silicon Valley startup Project Better Place hopes the fully electric prototype will be on Israel's streets in large numbers beginning at the end of 2010.

Backers of the project say the car will drastically reduce dependence on oil, cut emissions and put Israel at the forefront of international efforts to develop more environmentally friendly modes of transportation. Israel's government endorsed the project in January, and a Danish energy company also has joined as a partner.

But experts say technical pitfalls, such as a limited battery range, remain before the car will be marketable, and other car manufacturers are gambling on gas-electric hybrids as the green cars of the immediate future.

If the company's plan proceeds on schedule, Israel will be the first country to have electric cars on its highways in large numbers.

On the dashboard of the Renault sedan presented Sunday, the gas gauge was replaced by a screen showing how much battery power remained. In a test drive, the car accelerated quickly -the company says it can go from zero to 60 mph in eight seconds -and the engine remained nearly inaudible even at high speed.

The project is a joint venture between automotive giant Renault-Nissan, which is building the car, and Palo Alto, Calif.-based Project Better Place, which came up with the business model and is supposed to operate a recharging grid to be built across Israel beginning in 2009.

Several hundred cars are scheduled to hit Israel's streets in a pilot run next year, the company says, with larger numbers to arrive in late 2010.

The initiative is being led by Shai Agassi, an Israeli-American entrepreneur and high-tech wunderkind who raised $200 million to get the project off the ground. He also got Israel's government to endorse it earlier this year and promise tax incentives to promote the new vehicles when they go on the market.