Shai Agassi launched the venture publicly on 29 October 2007 as Project Better Place, with a proposition that inverted how cars are sold. You would buy the vehicle but not the battery — the most expensive and most anxiety-inducing part — and subscribe to the miles instead, the way you subscribe to a phone network. Better Place would build what it called an Electric Recharge Grid Operator: charge points at home and at work, plus a network of stations where a robot pulled the depleted pack out from under your car and slid a full one in. A memorandum with Renault-Nissan followed in January 2008. The seed round of $111 million was among the largest and fastest in history, and by January 2011 Better Place had raised $700 million, a third of it consumed by the switch stations themselves.

Denmark was not chosen for its size. It was chosen because it had a problem that Better Place claimed to solve twice over. The country was already generating around a fifth of its electricity from wind, and exporting much of it, because there was no way to store what the turbines produced when nobody needed it. DONG Energy, the dominant utility, put in alongside Better Place in a partnership worth €103 million — 770 million Danish kroner — on the theory that a national fleet of parked electric cars is also a national battery. The commercial launch came in late 2011. A Renault Fluence Z.E. sold for 205,000 kroner including VAT, a home charging post cost a one-off 9,995 kroner, and the driving itself came in five fixed-price tiers: 2,995 kroner a month bought unlimited kilometres above forty thousand a year. By December 2012 there were seventeen operational swap stations in the country, which was genuinely enough to drive anywhere in Denmark on a battery.

The technology was never the weak point. At a demonstration station in Tokyo in 2010, three converted taxis had their packs exchanged in an average of 59.1 seconds — faster than filling a tank. The deployed stations were slower, around five minutes, but the driver stayed in the car and the process ran itself like a car wash. Agassi liked to note that the mechanism borrowed from the systems F-16s use to load their bombs. Each station cost about half a million dollars, which Agassi framed as half the price of a petrol station, and which critics noticed was fifteen to twenty times the price of a DC fast charger. That was the real fork in the road, and the industry took the other branch. Tesla's chief engineer for vehicle engineering, Peter Rawlinson, put the objection bluntly: "Different batteries suit different cars. It's far too simplistic to look at batteries as isolation." Only one model ever ran on the Better Place network.

Four hundred Israeli corporations had signed letters of intent representing a potential eighty thousand cars, and the company said it held some seventy thousand orders against a contract to buy a hundred thousand Fluences from Renault. The real numbers never came close. Better Place opened its first swap station at Kiryat Ekron in March 2011 and peaked at twenty-one public stations in mid-September 2012; by the end of that October it had sold just 490 cars in Israel against a target of four thousand by the following June. Total Israeli sales reached 940 by April 2013. Denmark managed about four hundred. Meanwhile the company had opened fronts in Australia, Hawaii, China, Japan and the Netherlands, running pilots and signing memoranda in more than twenty-five regions while its two actual markets were still empty. The infrastructure was built ahead of demand that never arrived, in more countries than any startup could afford.

The collapse was fast once it started. Agassi resigned as global chief executive on 2 October 2012 and left the board a week later, replaced by Evan Thornley from the Australian arm. Within days the company was asking investors for about $100 million in emergency funding; by the end of the month it was reported to be cutting 150 to 200 of its 400 Israeli staff. In late January 2013 the chairman, Idan Ofer, fired Thornley, Dan Cohen took over as acting chief executive, the Australian rollout was shelved, and the board resolved to concentrate on Israel and Denmark. Better Place Danmark A/S began bankruptcy proceedings on 26 May 2013, the same day the parent filed in Israel. Renault honoured its agreement with the roughly five hundred Danish customers whose batteries it now effectively inherited. A rescue bid that summer collapsed when the buyers missed a first payment of 3.52 million shekels. Three years earlier, Foreign Policy had ranked Agassi twenty-eighth among the hundred top global thinkers.