Electric Car Owners Campaign For Better Place

As members of the Association for Electric Transportation Advancement, the car owners announced plans to form a cooperative of customers which hopes to acquire Better Place’s infrastructure of battery charging stations.

The leaders of the association invited other Better Place customers to join the cooperative so they could continue to use their vehicles and thereby improve the environment.

The car owners aren’t the only ones expressing interest in holding on to Better Place.

Last Sunday, American-Israeli solar entrepreneur Yosef Abramowitz stated he would probably place a bid on the bankrupt company’s assets. Abramowitz and his partners at Arava Power Company are behind the first grid-connected solar field in Israel.

Better Place’s liquidators said in a report filed with the court on Sunday that “many parties are interested in the company.”

According to the report, “Shortly after the appointment of the undersigned as the liquidators of the companies, they began receiving inquiries from many parties, both enterprises and private individuals, from Israel and abroad, which are engaged in a range of fields, about the acquisition of the activities and assets of the companies (including intellectual property rights and know-how) in whole or in part, as well as other companies of the Better Place group.”

The liquidators are currently operating Better Place on a temporary, scaled-down basis, having laid off 30 more development employees, after firing 155 employees in the first days after the liquidation.

Better Place owes Israeli creditors more than NIS 40 million, and Renault, which makes the electric car that Better Place sold, claims a €65 million lien for the debt for the batteries it supplied the company. The report states that the Better Place group has just NIS 38 million in its accounts.

This article appeared in print on page 7 of the June 11th, 2013 edition of Hamodia.