I’ve written a lot about the experience and I’m still as positive as I was that day. I’ve heard from many people who’ve bought electric cars, partly helped by my writing and I get a tremendously positive feeling when I hear those stories.

I have two new articles up today, the most comprehensive review of my year will be published a little later at Green Car Reports. It covers one year in a Better Place car.

I’ve also penned a companion piece for Times of Israel which answers a variety of questions that myself and fellow electric car pioneers get asked while we are driving and parking our cars.

Green Car Reports has published a report of mine laying out the sales improvements at Better Place

Overall sales in 2013 have been pretty good. The company is delivering cars at about the maximum rate it can.

This year, Better Place has reported the following sales figures:

• Jan: 102
• Feb: 113
• Mar: 82
• Apr: 125

A couple of notes: Deliveries last December were less than 10–but January was Better Place’s best-ever month. March deliveries were low because the Passover holiday cut the number of working days dramatically; most Israeli businesses experience the same slowdown.

Better Place Renault Fluence ZE on the streets of Jerusalem
The total deliveries of 422 cars through April represents 0.5 percent to 0.8 percent of the Israeli car market. The Better Place total matches sales of the well-established Toyota Prius, at 400 thus far this year. The best-selling car in Israel this year is the Ford Focus, at 4,512.

Comparing Israel to the U.S. (8 million people versus 311 million), the April figure of 125 cars–adjusted for much higher U.S. car ownership–would equate to sales of 8,888 cars a month in the U.S.

Read the whole thing.

And in a new development, Green Car Reports has also uncovered the fact that Tesla may strongly be considering some battery switching system for their Model S. We shall see.

From the mailbag:

We are pleased to announce on global Earth Day: Better Placed crossed 10 million electric km driven in Israel! And we are continuing forward at a rate of 1.5 million km on average each month!

This is an exciting moment in the life of Better Place. We showed that:

• Electric Cars are a drop in replacement for gasoline cars
• There is a solution that allows easy driving in an Electric Car range limitations
• The solution works, customers are satisfied and enjoy the experience of a quiet, pleasant drive

We wish for millions more electric km, and thank all those who are taking part in our success!

And 18,500 of those were mine!

As usual I put two of these flags on my car this year. Any difference they make to my car would be exactly the same on a petrol car, it’s just the absolute efficiency of my car is much easier to measure. If my range is 120km in normal use including freeway driving at fast speeds, an 8% reduction would drop that range by 8% which is 10km.

Well it didn’t I drove to Jerusalem and back twice with the flags in place and noticed no measurable increase in electricity usage. I drove at Israel’s legal limit (ahem) of 110km wherever possible. A straight drive from my home to Gina Sakarov switching station in Jerusalem had me arriving there with 30% battery. That’s absolutely the same as I usually experience without flags.

Overall, for the couple of weeks I’ve had the flags on the car, I can see no significant increase in electricity use.

I’m sure they make some difference, but it’s sub 1% and very hard to measure, even on an electric car as sensitive to this kind of thing as mine. Rain actually makes more of a difference.

There’s an article on Green Car Reports about how Tesla’s Model S car may well be outselling Mercedes, BMW and Audi in rather narrow category of large luxury car in the US. This may well be technically correct it.

Tesla said on April 1 that it delivered “more than 4,750″ Model S cars during the first quarter of this year, from January 1 to March 31.

In comparison, here are the first-quarter sales for the large luxury competitors:

• Audi A8:1,462
• BMW 7-Series: 2,338
• Lexus LS: 2,860
• Mercedes-Benz S Class: 3,077

There is one car in the large luxury segment that outsold the Tesla Model S, however.

That’s the 2013 Cadillac XTS, the newly introduced replacement for the previous DTS (itself derived from the old De Ville). Fully 7,130 XTSes were delivered from January through March.

This got me thinking about what is going on.

It has been my contention for a while: the luxury car makers are in deep, deep doo-doo land. They’ve spent decades (a century in some cases) learning to make a car with the lowest possible “NVH” Noise Vibration and Harshness.

Decades of fine engineering knowhow, careful fabrication and painstaking attention to detail are all rendered completely devalued when Renault can build a Fluence ZE in Turkey (Turkey!) that rivals any BMW 3 series, Audi A4 or Merc C class.

At the upper end, with the huge margin S class barges, Tesla will eat them for breakfast too.

All you have to do is take out the exploding bit at the front and the entire nature of the car changes to something so refined it costs thousands more to match.

Yesterday I received an update to the Better Place Oscar in car navigation and range prediction system. We’ve been waiting a long time for this and over the next few days I’ll review it thoroughly. I’m most keen to see if they’ve improved the system’s ability to cope with predicting the effect of large changes in altitude on battery use.

With this upgrade, however, we’ve lost one major cosmetic feature: a 3D view that used to show pretty graphic versions of the buildings. They’ve done this because a new range prediction system is much more computationally intensive and the unit in the car couldn’t walk and chew gum.

I’ll only know if the range prediction has improved after a few trips when the car has learned my driving style (pedal to the metal usually).

There is one other hidden feature we’ve lost but perhaps with some lobbying we’ll get that one back.

Typically today’s electric car battery capacities are measured in kilo-watt hours: kWh. 1 kWh is the amount of energy used by a 1000 W room heater if you run it for 1 hour. My car uses around 16 to 18 kWh to drive 100km and the specification of the battery is a maximum of 22.0 kWh. The most expensive Tesla Model S has an 85 kWh battery (so you can see why it can drive so much further).

The old Oscar system used to allow us to view the battery’s state of charge as either a percentage or as a raw kWh number. Even displaying an accurate percentage figure puts Better Place ahead. The Nissan Leaf and the Tesla don’t do this and their owners rely on a “guess-o-meter” that tells them the expected range they have left. That, however, is a complex number derived from a calculation involving both the battery’s state of charge and the most recent driving style. So it varies wildly.

By comparison, Oscar’s percentage or kWh readout drops in a predictable linear way depending on the terrain and the speed and most owners get used to this. Oscar even takes this further and predicts your state of charge at a destination including taking up-hill, down-hill and speed limits into account.

The advantage of the kWh display was two fold:

1. It gave a figure to one decimal place (0.0 to 22.0) making it much more graduated (220 graduations vs 100) than the 0% to 100% available with percentage and;
2. The system reports all values of 20.4 kWh or above as 100% and 0.3 kWh and below is 0%

Point 2 is important because there is some variation in the state of charge when coming to the car in the morning. I’m not sure what this is linked to but it isn’t always battery age. Remember, I switch batteries fairly frequently but sometimes go a week or two with the same one. I see a range from about 20.8 kWh to 22.0 kWh. All these are reported as 100% but it does make a difference in how far I drive before the percentage starts dropping.

Before we lost the system I made a little graph and it clearly shows this hysteresis and a linear relationship between battery percentage and kWh in between.

kWh vs Displayed % for battery state of charge on Better Place Renault Fluence ZE

If you want the raw numbers:

• Lower cut off (at or below which 0% is reported) is 0.3 kWh
• Upper cut off (at or above which 100% is reported) is 20.4 kWh
• Each kWh represents 4.9495% of the Renault Fluence ZE’s battery.

If you don’t follow me on either Twitter or Facebook, I’ve embedded on this page a widget with my tweets about Eilat. If you look through these you should find the link to the site that will allow you to follow my progress.

I should be moving around 18:00 Israel time which will be 11:00 on the East Coast and 08:00 on the West Coast.

Tweets about “#eilat from:brianoflondon”

Better Place Renault Fluence ZE cars sold and awaiting delivery 27 Feb 2013 – Photo: Brian of London

Today I have a major piece about Better Place up on the Times of Israel again. This time the target is the woeful Israeli Government behaviour toward Better Place.

Despite professing that they want to move Israel off Oil, they’re making completely stupid moves that completely ignore the massive investment Better Place have made here.

An economic Iron Dome Israel isn’t using

There are so many very low cost or zero cost actions the Israeli Government could be taking if it is serious about kicking the oil habit: a reduction in company car tax for electric vehicles; parking price reductions; reduction in fees levied on Israel’s toll road; purchase for use by Government ministers and employees; legislation making it harder for condominium buildings to block installation of home charge points; stipulation to build charging infrastructure into new parking lots and many more.

None of these measures (all in place in various European countries) would come even close to matching the money Better Place has already invested in Israel. I’m far from an advocate of government intervention in markets, but Better Place’s current sales offer is attractive enough for the Government to lease cars for its own use. They are competitive with similar vehicles. France just ordered more than 2000 electric cars from Renault without a switch network in place!

When sold and bought in larger numbers, electric cars will become dramatically cheaper than existing oil cars. If we are serious about having any alternative to oil burning cars: this is the strongest horse to back with minimal short term assistance. Just the confidence given by the government leasing 500 cars would make a huge difference and actually save taxpayers money from day one.

For those of us happy owners who know the solution works, this continued lack of any interest in the success of this project by the Israeli Government borders on the insane or (and I’ll suggest this here) reeks of political corruption. Was it personal antipathy toward Shai Agassi or Idan Ofer? What is the reason. There is no logical way to profess the goal of reducing dependence on oil and then ignore the $500m investment that Better Place have made.

Read the whole piece and leave comments at the Times of Israel.

I also wish to expand on my thinking about government support later: as anyone who has followed me for a while would know, I’m most certainly a small government kind of guy so calling for government handouts is not my style.

If anyone who reads it has any connections that would like to translate and publish in Hebrew in one of the major Israeli papers, please get in touch with me.

As many readers know I’ve laboriously documented how I went from electric car sceptic to number one fan (with a bullet) since attending a simple tweet up at Better Place’s converted gas storage tower over a year ago.

But the dream is over for me. As I was out driving last night I realised how much I missed the smell of petrol and of handing over my hard earned cash to pay for it.

I longed once again to flirt with the beautiful petrol pump attendants we have in Israel (did you know that there is a law forbidding the hiring of ugly male ones?). There is something so sexy about a stained white T-shirt and yellow dungarees.

I missed having my windshield smeared with dirty water.

I missed the lurching, sudden deceleration and re-acceleration of gear changes.

I missed the loud roar of thousands of explosions occurring just mere centimetres from my legs.

I missed driving around with 50 liters of highly explosive liquid sloshing around just behind my children.

It grew tired of hearing my kids bicker over who would plug in and unplug my car.

So if you know anyone who wants a beautiful electric car that drives like a dream and costs less per km than any similar oil burning car, please get in touch today only!

Note: there is a Jewish tradition during Purim to tell tall tales, it’s somewhat similar to April Fools. Get it?