VentureBeat

Large auto makers Nissan Motor Co. and Renault SA have entered a partnership to develop an all-electric car to be distributed first in Israel, then in other countries, working in collaboration with Shai Agassi’s Palo Alto-based startup Project Better Place.

PBP recently amassed $200 million in venture investments but only disclosed a vague plan to lease out batteries and electric cars, as well as provide charging stations for them. Its near-term plans now seem more concrete; in the Israeli project, it will work alongside the government to develop a grid of 500,000 charging stations.

Agassi’s partnership with Israel looks like an especially canny business decision for more than one reason. The government has strong motivation to see his project succeed — the country, surrounded on every side by hostile oil-rich states, has few natural resources of its own.

Additionally, with its small size and short commute distances, Israel is especially well-suited to the electric car business. The first model the Nissan/Renault partnership will build is planned to have a 60 mile range for city driving, or 100 miles on the highway, and a top speed of about 70 miles per hour.

If the plan is successful, other small countries, like Denmark, will be next on the list.

Notably, the manufacturers stated that they want the car to be as “normal as possible,” in order to reach a mass market with sales of ten to twenty thousand vehicles a year in Israel.

The vehicles themselves will eventually be exported to the United States. However, replacing our gasoline-based transportation infrastructure would take a great deal more than a $200 million investment.

When Shai Agassi departed software giant SAP AG in March, it surprised many people because he was on track to become chief executive of the giant company.

He left declaring bold plans to help convert his native Israel and its neighbor Jordan into gasoline-free economies with nationwide electronic transportation systems. It was a noble vision.

Well, now he’s already emerged, leading a new Silicon Valley company to make electric cars, backed with a whopping $200 million in initial funding from Israel Corp., an Israel-based oil, trade and shipping conglomerage (which invested $100 million), VantagePoint Venture Partners and others.

The WSJ has the scant details available on the still-stealth, Palo Alto, Calif., company code-named Better Place, which already employs ten.

According to the piece, Agassi wants to use existing battery technologies, which are enough to get cars to go about 100 miles before recharging. The twist: Instead of making customers pay for the car and the expensive battery, they’d pay only for the car.

Meanwhile, his company would buy and own the batteries, and charge the car owner a monthly subscription fee to recharge the batteries. It would also set up a network of service centers to charge the batteries. It’s not clear whether this will substantially reduce costs, because someone would still have to pay the cost of dealing with the batteries, and the cost leaves electric cars still more expensive than conventional cars. But at least it takes away some of the stress on consumers who balk when they consider the complication of having to replace batteries every few years.

Here are the latest moves in the Silicon Valley venture/executive world:

Shai Agassi, heir apparent at SAP, steps down — The 38-year-old Agassi, the Silicon Valley-based president of Software company SAP, was being groomed for the chief executive job, but became impatient. Stepping down, he has bold plans to help convert his native Israel and its neighbor Jordan into fuel-less economies with nationwide electronic transportation systems. That’s a noble vision, and we wish him well. (See story in Merc.)

Tim Chang joins Norwest Venture Partners — The electrical engineer and Stanford MBA (bio here) has departed venture firm Gabriel Venture Partners, and will take his trade to Norwest. He made the move, he said, because Norwest gives him a better platform to exploit his experience in Asia — namely, Japan, Korea and China. A principal, he’ll focus on “next generation” companies serving the mobile phone. Users won’t be firing up a browser on their phone and going to a portal, he argues. Rather, they’ll configure RSS feeds to pull content to their phone. Aside the orange RSS buttons you currently see on Web pages, you’ll soon see “mobilize me” buttons, to facilitate the shift to mobile, he argues.

Saar Gur moves to Charles River Ventures — Gur, 30, has had a colorful history since moving to Silicon Valley from Pittsburgh in 2001 to attend Stanford business school. Unperturbed by the valley’s post-bubble funk when he graduated in 2003, he and a partner raised about $12 million and bought what appeared to be a bunch of undervalued businesses and land in Connecticut. Within two years, he’d sold it, making three times his investment. That gave him the confidence to dabble. He helped run marketing company Adteractive, but left to invest in and help a variety of start-ups, from RockYou, to Admob and Flixster — all of them showing decent momentum. He was also co-founder of Brightroll. He’s known to have a big Rolodex. At CRV, where he is a junior partner, he’ll invest in consumer Internet, mobile and energy. Susan Wu, btw, has also been promoted to junior partner. CRV has recently become one of the more lively and impressive venture teams in the valley.

Sue Siegel joins Mohr Davidow Ventures as partner — Siegel helped build Affymetrix, joining in 1998 as a sales exec in 1998. The company pioneered “GeneChip” technology, which helped with personalized medicine. Siegel was most recently president at the company; she saw it grow to $300M in sales. She worked at GE
Healthcare, E. I. DuPont, Eastman Kodak, and Bio-Rad Labs. She’s on the board of stealth company, Pacific Biosciences. She brings MDV’s healthcare team to three partners.