On the road

Heard in B.Amsterdam, Amsterdam Slotervaart, on 4 June 2015:

The evaluation of the Highspeed train public tender by the Dutch politicians has ended last week. What a disaster. Big mistakes were made. Market failures. Technical failures. The Dutch state failed. Still missing those fast trains in The Netherlands. More lucky we are on the road. Jelle Vastert, of electric-car manufacturer Tesla, gave a great lecture on the EU Super Charger Programme at the Catch-Up session of the Amsterdam Economic Board on 4 June 2015. Theme: start-up ecosystems. How to develop them successfully. The audience were mostly young people, hackers, students, friends, some fourhundred of them. The corporates were a minority this time. So the discussions were a kind of battle between the corporates and the hackers: beat them! Destroy them! The only alternative seems to be: buy them!, as in the case of Marvia, a start-up that was bought by PostNL. Moderator was Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten of TheNextWeb. Vastert gave a great show on how his company is developing a network of electric charging stations all over Europe. It was about how advanced the European Union really is.

So where to go with your electric car this summer? Vastert asserted that it would be possible for the first time to drive with your Tesla car from Rome to the North Cape. At an interval of a three-hours drive you would find another charging station. A stop of only twenty minutes is needed to drive to the next station, although for a full charge it takes at least 75 minutes (Super charger works twenty times faster than a regular charger). The use is for free. A year ago there were only 14 Supercharger stations spread across Norway, Germany, Switzerland and The Netherlands. August 2014 there were already 50 stations opened. Every day, Tesla claims, they open one somewhere in Europe. Now you will find them also in the UK, France, Spain, Italy, Austria, Denmark, and Sweden. The Supercharger stations have been planned strategically: between the biggest cities. Why? Because the use of electric cars started in metropolises, not on the countryside. And how lucky Europe is! So many cities. Compare it with Asia, where Tesla is also developing a Supercharger network. Just a coastal road. So what about those highspeed trains?