Brilliance is knowing it when you see it

Rico says that this (courtesy of an article by Clive Thompson in The New York Times) is brilliance:

Shai Agassi stood in a warehouse on the outskirts of Tel Aviv one afternoon last month and watched his battery-swapping robot go to work. He was conducting a demonstration of the curious machine that is central to his two-year-old clean-energy company, which is called Better Place. Agassi’s grand plan is to kick-start the global adoption of electric cars by minimizing one of the biggest frustrations with the technology: the need for slow and frequent recharges. The robot is the key to his solution. Unlike most electric-car technologies, which generally require you to plug your car into a power source and recharge an onboard battery for hours, the Better Place robot is designed to reach under the chassis of an electric car, pluck its battery out and replace it with a new one, much the same way you’d put new batteries in a child’s toy. Agassi told me previously that his goal was five minutes or less for the whole process. “If we can’t do this in less time than it takes to fill your gasoline tank,” he said, “we don’t have a company.”
On the day of the presentation, a group of investors and employees milled around, peering down with interest at the mechanism. The robot — a squat platform that moves on four dinner-plate-size white wheels — scuttled back and forth along a twenty-foot-long set of metal rails. At one end of the rails, a huge blue battery, the size of a large suitcase, sat suspended in a frame. As we watched, the robot zipped up to the battery, made a nearly inaudible click, and pulled the battery downward. It ferried the battery over to the other end of the rails, dropped it off, picked up a new battery, hissed back over to the frame and, in one deft movement, snapped the new battery in the place of the old one. The total time: 45 seconds.
Agassi— a 41-year-old Israeli-American with a piercing stare— beamed. “Check this out,” he said, dragging me over and pointing at a set of thick two-inch metal hooks on the frame. The latches use the same technology as those used “to hold 500-pound bombs in place" on bombers, he explained. Designed to release bombs with millisecond precision, the technology is also perfectly suited to keeping batteries safely inside the cars, yet allowing them to be extracted in a blink. Agassi obviously enjoyed the swords-to-ploughshares imagery, too.
Electric cars have long been a fetish object for environ-mentalists: electricity can be produced from wind, solar, or nuclear sources with little or no CO2. But now even the auto industry seems to be taking the idea of the alt-car seriously. When the Big Three filed their restructuring plans earlier this year, all aggressively emphasized their intentions to begin producing electric vehicles and hybrids. General Motors has promised to begin selling its electric-powered Volt sedan next year. Toyota and other manufacturers have their own offerings as well.
Yet all these alternatives suffer from a common problem: refueling. The most advanced electric car currently for sale, the Tesla Roadster, runs for no more than 250 miles on a charge, and others can do only 50 miles or so; then they require two or more hours of plug-in time to recharge. The problem of refueling is so significant that fans of electric cars have a phrase for it: range anxiety, the nagging fear that you’ll run out of juice before you can find a charge spot and be stranded at the side of the road. It is the major reason that most Americans, even as they cheer on the development of low- or no-emissions vehicles, are leery of actually buying one. And if people won’t buy them, carmakers won’t make them.
Agassi aims to solve this problem. Going country by country, his start-up firm has begun to construct what it hopes will ultimately be a worldwide network of millions of small-scale “charging spots”, parking-meter-like posts scattered around downtown areas and along highways. But crucially, he is also building roadside robotized battery-swap stations that provide fresh, fully charged batteries without having to wait hours for a charge. It’s a dual system: on most days, his customers would charge their cars by plugging into a charge spot at home or at work; a long drive would entail pit stops every one hundred miles or so for a battery swap. Agassi plans to make his money by buying electricity in bulk from solar arrays and wind farms and then reselling it to his customers.
The idea is a little odd, to say the least: a car with a replaceable battery? It is also extraordinarily bold, requiring carmakers to fundamentally rethink the way they build cars. But Agassi, a charismatic entrepreneur who walked away from one of the world’s top software jobs, is “amazingly persuasive”, Shimon Peres, the president of Israel and an admirer of Agassi’s, told me. In barely two years, Agassi has persuaded investors to contribute $400 million, and several countries and states— including Israel, Denmark and Hawaii— have offered him lucrative tax breaks. The French automaker Renault is spending $600 million over three years to develop a car with swappable batteries, to be released in 2011. In Israel, where Better Place has already installed hundreds of its signature blue car-charging stations, Agassi is credited with convincing the nation’s jaded political class that they have an opportunity to actually wean their country off oil. But the question is whether he can convince the most important group of all: customers.
“Some people say I’m missing the fear gene,” Agassi mused when we first met in Tel Aviv in February, and I couldn’t entirely tell if he was joking. Agassi has darkly brooding eyebrows and a square jaw, and carries himself with a granite self-confidence that is striking, even unsettling. When he came down from the hotel penthouse he was staying in— he lives in California with his wife, but travels to Israel often for business— he greeted me in the lobby dressed in a sleek black suit with no tie. “He has very high self-esteem,” Idan Ofer, head of the Israel Corporation and Better Place’s first big investor, told me. “He sees himself as a world-recognized figure.”
At age fourteen, Agassi persuaded his father to buy him an Apple IIe by promising him ten percent of his “lifetime profits” from writing software. It turned out to be an excellent deal: at 21, the younger Agassi founded TopTier Software— which made portals to help companies organize their internal information— and sold it nine years later to the German software giant SAP for $400 million. SAP put him in charge of developing new software for Fortune 500 businesses.
“I’ve learned every industry in the world,” Agassi told me as we drank coffee in the hotel’s business lounge. “One day, it would be Apple and Sony. The other day it would be BP and Chevron.” By 2007, Agassi had built his division at SAP from zero sales to $2 billion annually, and he was being groomed to replace the C.E.O.

Rico says there's a lot (five pages) of article; go there and read it all; this stuff is important. Rico says if he could find a way to invest in this guy, he would; there'll be a lot money made via this idea... (And nice to see news about some Agassi other than André...)