Did Better Place just need better timing?

I drive an electric car, and I can’t tell you how desperate it has made me at times. I’ve been stranded on the London-to-Amsterdam route, waiting for a tow truck because I couldn’t find the right charger along the way. The infrastructure wasn’t there to support my journey. Every time that happens, I think: what a pity that Better Place isn’t still around.

Better Place proposed a different answer: battery swapping. Instead of waiting for a depleted battery to charge, a driver would exchange it for a full one and continue the journey. Shai Agassi described that wider electric-car ecosystem in his 2009 TED talk. It was an ambitious attempt to make charging infrastructure and vehicle ownership work together (Agassi, 2009).

Anyone with an electric car dreams of this, right? But Better Place reached liquidation proceedings in 2013. My reading is that the story raises several recognisable marketing and internationalisation questions: how quickly to scale across markets, how to win customers over to a particular battery system, and how to secure the automaker partnerships the model needs. A proposition designed around one pattern of journeys cannot simply be assumed to fit every market. Compatibility and freedom of choice matter to customers; a persuasive proposition has to make those trade-offs worthwhile (Kotler & Keller, 2016). Without enough compatible cars and partners, how could a swapping network reach the scale it needed?

I still think it was a great idea. Perhaps it was ahead of its time, or perhaps the execution asked too much of too many markets at once. My towing story certainly tells me that the problem it wanted to solve was real. It does not prove that this particular business model would have solved it. Cultural, regulatory and technological differences in adoption all needed room in the expansion plan.

So the lesson in international marketing is that timing and localisation matter. Even when a product addresses a real frustration, misjudging market readiness can turn an ambitious expansion into a very expensive collapse.

For those of us who have been stuck on the roadside hunting for chargers, it is hard not to wish Better Place had actually worked.