Some recent news about Renault and Better Place Australia is reinforcing my kooky theory that Renault is distancing itself from Better Place. Specifically, several news reports are circulating that Renault is indefinitely delaying the Australian launch of the Fluence Z.E. sedan. Why? Better Place has yet to build the required battery swap station infrastructure in Australia.
. As of late November the business plan was to back away from making car sales, and instead focus on infrastructure operation. I haven’t checked for news since then.Better Place spokeswoman Felicity Glennie-Holmes provided this lengthy statement:
“We always said that the launch of the switch infrastructure in Australia would be 12 to 18 months behind our other markets.”
“When we originally talked about switch networks around the world we had an ambitious plan. We’ve gone live in both Israel and Denmark and we have national coverage in both of those countries, but those deployments happened a little later than we anticipated, and so therefore the Australian deployment will also be a little later. With any new technology there are always unexpected things that come up.”
“Whether that’s in technology and software development or whether it’s in actual deployment or site acquisition, introducing a whole new way of driving to the world isn’t something that can be done overnight, so I think what we’ve experienced is the natural process of implementing a completely new system into different countries.”
“We’ve been doing some really detailed network planning, so we’ve mapped and analyzed most of the driver experiences in the major metropolitan areas. We’ll first deploy in Canberra and progressively rollout across the rest of the country.”
Sources: InsideEVs.com, CarAdvice.com.au,
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