Eww, a cellphone style, lock in walled garden economics, on something so basic like electricity, leaves a bad taste in my mouth. If this style of business become popular, the common slashdot metaphor of "imagine if you couldn't get gas because it's a honda gas station", or "only special ford cars can go on this road" might actually become a reality.
If you're creating a new market, often the only way to be profitable is to create lock-in. Before the PC, you had to buy a computer and the peripherals and the software from a single vendor. Once adoption hits critical mass, it makes sense to make everything interoperable. With cellphones, the walled gardens are again just breaking down. And so on.
Currently, no other strategy for moving away from gasoline is even remotely as promising; I say having to pay for charging is a small price to pay.
Cell phones get away with it because the network provides authentication. The phones themselves remain relatively unhacked because there's just so damn many.
With a car, there's no inherent service model. It'll only be a matter of time until people buy cheap cars and modify them to charge/run independently of the service. We all saw what happened to the i-Opener.
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Eww, a cellphone style, lock in walled garden economics, on something so basic like electricity, leaves a bad taste in my mouth. If this style of business become popular, the common slashdot metaphor of "imagine if you couldn't get gas because it's a honda gas station", or "only special ford cars can go on this road" might actually become a reality.
This has happened many times before.
If you're creating a new market, often the only way to be profitable is to create lock-in. Before the PC, you had to buy a computer and the peripherals and the software from a single vendor. Once adoption hits critical mass, it makes sense to make everything interoperable. With cellphones, the walled gardens are again just breaking down. And so on.
Currently, no other strategy for moving away from gasoline is even remotely as promising; I say having to pay for charging is a small price to pay.
Won't people hack their way out? You'd need to DRM your electricity.
Cell phones get away with it because the network provides authentication. The phones themselves remain relatively unhacked because there's just so damn many.
With a car, there's no inherent service model. It'll only be a matter of time until people buy cheap cars and modify them to charge/run independently of the service. We all saw what happened to the i-Opener.