Alef Arendsen

Yesterday evening I plugged Pixelmator. Today I’m plugging my own (and brand new) company. yb7m3×8kw4

Yesterday we launched the site for Remotion. If you’re English, no need to follow the link; it’s all in Dutch . I’ll shortly explain what we’re doing right here.

Electric vehicles are clean, simple and can be affordable, given the right conditions. Together with a large group of other organisations, Remotion is going to accelerate the introduction of electric vehicles on the Dutch market. The plan is two-fold:

Step 1: Demand generation for electric vehicles

Tonight, we’re creating demand for at least 3.000 electric vehicles in the coming 3 years. Together with a few other large organisations and the government, we’re guaranteeing the purchasing of 3.000 electric vehicles. These vehicles will all be of one of three types: a Volkswagen Golf-like car, a small Caddy-like car and a Transporter-like car. Mind you, these might not be Caddies, Golfs and Transporters in the end. We’ve only set the conditions for all of the cars and are going to ask the market to come up with the best offer. Maybe it’s even going to be a Trabant!

Generating demand solves two big problems that still appear to be there in the market of electric transportation: price and infrastructure. By generating massive demand car manufacturers don’t have to bother with selling them (they’re already sold) and can start producing cars in a much more efficient way. This will cause prices to go down. Secondly, the infrastructure that needs to be in place for electric cars can be set up now, because there will be at least 3.000 electric cars (and probably many more) on the market by the end of 2012.

Step 2: Offering a mobility service pack for consumers and small businesses

The second thing Remotion is going to do is the offering of a mobility service pack for consumers and small businesses. The demand generation initiative above is based on three types of cars, no more than that. These cars will be bought buy large organisations that are most of the time capable of setting up infrastructure themselves. Consumers and small businesses though have no way of doing this themselves. Remotion is going to help these people with getting everything they need to start driving an electric car. Starting with the charging infrastructure (at home and at the office), a replacement car for long distances (in which case an electric car won’t work), insurance, financing and much more.

And by bundling demand for other cars than just those mentioned above, we hope to give consumers and small businesses these exact same price benefits.

Today we’ve launched. We kindly received a full-page ad in one of the Dutch newspapers (the biggest actually) by the guys that finance our initiative (Stichting DOEN). Furthermore, the news about the demand generating initiative has already leaked to the news: see the Trouw site.

Occasionally I’ll update you about the progress that we’re making.