My initial reaction is that this is a turning point in electric car technology. If there was one company suited to take the role in battery swapping like Tesla did for electric cars in general, it was Better Place. With them gone, and battery technology rapidly improving, battery swapping for consumer cars may never take off.

Just finished reading [Wide Lens][1] about innovation of ecosystems, why things can fail even if you do everything right if you ignore the ecosystems. One of their main example for the complete system, for a company which did thing right, was Better Place. I was just thinking to compare the Tesla model with Better Place. Well, I still think that the book is very insightful, just there's more to the story than it was written at that time...

[1]: http://www.amazon.com/The-Wide-Lens-Strategy-Innovation/dp/1... "Wide Lens on Amazon"

I wasn't familiar with Better Place, but the headline reads as though it would be an article outlining WHERE one should file for bankruptcy for strategic reasons.

It's somewhat sad. I really hope Better Place's demise happens because battery-swapping lost to just-keep-the-battery-in-the-car-and-charge-it strategy; not because oil-is-still-more-economical. :-/

But seriously, how will we ever be able to drive truly long distances with EVs? Super-charger stations that recharge batteries in a very short time?

Better Place always seemed to me like a marketing stunt. I am really not that surprised this happened. The idea, although, is still interesting. I guess another lesson of the big difference there is between a good idea and a successful implementation.

Aside from the huge money lost the investors have, my heart goes to the ~1000 car owners that are now stuck. I hope that there will be some money left to compensate them for being true early adopters and believers.

Battery-swapping as a thing for the general public's use of electric vehicles always struck me as just stupid. It works against an important advantage of EVs (no more detours to gas stations), requires standardization of a nascent product space (does that ever work?), adds costs (at the very least, that machinery must be maintained), and confers no advantage at all for the vast majority of car use cases.

The general public simply does not take long road trips frequently enough for a full network of battery-swap stations to be viable.