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.

On to week five of the ‘Will I be able to drive an electric car for most of my driving needs’ experiment. Last week wasn’t too good when it comes to short trips capable of being done with an EV. Let’s see how this week turns out.

Reporting on week 5 (August 31 – September 6)

Monday August 31: I had an interesting start of the week. Not having gotten a lot of sleep (I only arrived back home at about 2.3am back from Italy) I worked at home a bit to get rid of my email backlog. I then took the train to Schiphol. This is where I met up with Lars. Lars drove with me from Italy back home. He’s visiting his parents and live in Hoofddorp. Last night I didn’t want to drive all the back to Hoofddorp and back in the middle of the night, so I gave Lars my car and we agreed to meet up at Schiphol airport the following morning to do the exchange.

After having gotten my car back, I drove to The Hague where I had a very interesting meeting at the Department of Transportation. We talked about the current state of the industry, the fiscal benefits involved with electric vehicles and some other stuff I can’t say too much about yet (hopefully after coming Tuesday I will ).

Following this meeting I drove to Amsterdam Zuid-Oost (South East) where I had a meeting with the Ecomovement guys to discuss a potential project we’re going to do with them. At about 5.30 I queued up between Abcoude and Vinkeveen (this is where the normal traffic jam on the A2 always is) and got home at about 6.30. Later at night, I took the train to Amsterdam to have dinner and went back later in the night.

Now basically today was a bit tricky. Had I not given Lars my car, I would have been able to do this with an EV. (Utrecht – The Hague – Amsterdam – Utrecht totals to about 160 kilometers). But then again, I gave my car to Lars, so I had to get it back. I’ll let the referees decide on this one, but for now, I’ll put a ‘yes’ in for today.

Tuesday September 1: Today was busy, very busy. I drove to my first appointment in Amsterdam at about 8am. This was at JTeam’s office, where given the criteria I would have gotten a charger. I left the office to go to Naarden at about 1.30. I spent about one hour at the office, discussing various things and then left for Haarlem to discuss the progress on the website for Remotion (yes, that’s the name). From Haarlem I went straight home and worked until about midnight.

This totals to about 175 kilometers. Close to the 180km, which is the maximum range I set out to use in the first place. But given the fact that I can charge my car at the office in Amsterdam, this would definitely have worked!

Wednesday September 2: Today was another busy day, but an exciting one. I drove off to Hilversum today to meet with Rogier Kroymans, Sales Manager from Tesla. There, we took the Tesla Roadster for a test drive. Now this car is an absolutely exciting one to drive. I’ll save the details for later, since this post is about my driving patterns in my gas guzzling X-Trail and not an electric car, but man, this car rocks!

I then drove to Naarden for a nice day at the office. At about 5.30 I went back home for a nice evening of work there.

Today totals to about 62 kilometers, which is like the driving day I would to have more often! Definitely a yes for the EV.

Thursday September 3:
I drove to the office in Naarden in the morning, stayed there all day to drive off to Amsterdam in the evening for CleanDrinks in restaurant Fifteen. At about midnight I went back home. This totals to about 100 kilometers, perfect for an EV.

Friday September 4:
I first drove off to Haarlem today to discuss a few things with the website guys. I then drove to Rotterdam to interview some people at the Hogeschool van Rotterdam. Later this month, I’ll publish the results of these interviews in a video. After having finished that I drove back to Haarlem to finish the working day there. At about 7.30pm I drove to Amsterdam to have dinner with friends and at about 11.30pm I drove back home.

Totaling to about 270 kilometers, this would not have been a day for an EV, given the criteria I set out a few weeks ago.

Saturday September 5:
Finally some time off. I drove to Hilversum to drop off the raw footage of the interviews first and then drove to Wijk aan Zee to get some kiting done. I returned back home at about 7pm. This totals to about 150 kilomters, so an EV would have worked.

Sunday September 6:
I didn’t drive at all today.

Conclusions so far

Monday	160 km	This would have worked
Tuesday	175 km	EV would have worked
Wednesday	62 km	This would also have worked using an EV
Thursday	100 km	Yes, this would have worked
Friday	270 km	Nope
Saturday	100 km	Yes!
Sunday	0 km	No car needed

Well, basically this was an okay week, although there was one day I couldn’t drive an EV due to range.

And now what…

I’ve reported on my daily use of my car for 5 weeks. In these weeks I’ve taken a vacation, been to Italy, did some kitesurfing and had a pretty insane amount of appointments. Personally, I’ve got the feeling that this is more heavy than normal, but then again, I think it’s good to have seen some demanding times. This way, it can only get better.

I think the time has come to start thinking about other aspects of driving an EV to see if I can manage to actually make the switch.

From next week on, I’ll be blogging on the blog of my new company, Remotion. We’ll be launching our site next Tuesday and I’ll blog about that here as well. The new site is going to be in Dutch, but I’ll occasionally blog about my experiences here as well.

Since the beginning of Summer, the government in the Netherlands, the government has decided to promote electric vehicles with a series of measures taken to help the industry. Today I met up with a few guys from the Dutch Department of Transportation and a few other government organizations to discuss some of these benefits amongst others. This post discusses some of these benefits.

Early August I started a series of blog posts trying to answer the question whether or not I will be able to drive an electric car. One of the aspects obviously is to see how my driving patterns fit in with the limited range that the current generation of electric vehicles have. This is what I did in previous blog posts. Of course, the range aspect is not the only thing I have to consider when deciding whether or not to start driving an EV. Cost of the main other one. I firmly believe that sustainable products should not cost more than product that are not sustainable in one way or the other. That’s I wanted to figure out what the tax benefits where and how they relate to each other. Let’s discuss each and every one of them individually.

BPM (or belasting op personenauto’s en motorrijtuigen)

BPM is a form of taxation that has to be paid for every registered car or motorcycle in the Netherlands. For a gasoline-powered car this is 40% is the net list price minus €1288. For diesel-powered cars it is 40% minus €366. For now, this taxation has been abolished for cars powered by 100% electric vehicles, hybrid vehicles capable of driving at least 24 kilometers solely with a battery or fuel cell and cars with hydrogen-based engine. To give you an idea what this means: suppose the list price of your car is €25.000. Excluding VAT (based on the list price less BPM) this car would cost you €33.712. Including VAT (19%) this car will set you back €38.462.

MRB (or motorrijtuigenbelasting)

MRB stands for Motorrijtuigenbelasting and is the Dutch road tax. The amount of MRB you pay depends on the weight of the vehicle you drive, the kind of engine, the amount of CO2 it emits and the province you live in. In my current situation (Nissan X-Trail, ~1350kg, gasoline-powered, living in Utrecht), I pay €660 in MRBs on a yearly basis. The good thing is, the MRB has been abolished as well for electric vehicles. This saves you a mere €660 on a yearly basis for the kind of car that I drive. Now, you can’t get a Nissan X-Trail powered by electrons, but it’s still quite a bit of money, even for a smaller car.

Income tax for leased cars

This is a special one. In the Netherlands, lots of people drive leased cars provided by their employers. When you drive a leased car, you pay more income tax. In practice it works like this. If you drive a Volkswagen Golf with a total price of €30.000 (including VAT and BPM) you have to add a certain percentage of that price to your gross income (depending on the amount of CO2 the car emits it’s 14%, 20% or 25%). Income tax varies from 30-something% to 52%. I always use 25% for my car with an income tax of 50%, which means I pay 12.5% of the list price of my car on a yearly basis! This quickly amounts to several thousands of Euros!

For electric vehicles, the current legislation is to calculate a lower percentage of only 10%. This would mean that in comparison to my current car, I only pay 5% of the total list price per year, instead of 12.5%!

No in my case, this doesn’t hold, because I bought the car in person. But for leased cars, this is definitely interesting.

Another interesting fact is that several parties have called for totally abolishing this kind of taxation all together for a certain period. This would make things even more interesting. I learnt today that this is just talks, and hasn’t been turned into concrete legislation yet, so we’ll see what happens to that.

Investment benefit (investeringsaftrek) for companies

Another benefit the government has given companies that own electric cars has been put under the MIA/Vamil arrangement. From the Senter Novem website:

The Netherlands aims to create a sustainable economy. One of the ways to reach that goal is to stimulate the development and use of environmental friendly equipment and machinery. Therefore the Dutch government initiated several programmes that offer financial support to participants in the innovation chain. The MIA\Vamil supports enterprises at the end of the innovation chain. These programmes facilitate the use of new technologies and stimulate the introduction of new technologies on the market.

Through two programmes, implemented jointly by SenterNovem and the Dutch Tax authorities, Dutch companies investing in environmental friendly equipment can deduct part of the costs from their fiscal profit. As a result, the programmes encourage introduction of innovative, environmental friendly technologies.

Through the MIA programme, companies can deduct up to 40 percent of their investments (purchase costs and production costs) from their fiscal profit in the year of procurement.

The Vamil programme gives entrepreneurs the option of accelerated depreciation, which can result in lower interest payments and improved liquidity.

For electric cars, I assume the maximum percentage holds for the MIA programme, meaning that you can deduct 40% of the investment in an electric vehicle (obviously this is going to be gross, not including VAT) before taxes. Dutch profit tax is approximately 25% (I’ll look this up later), so for profitable companies, this means 25% of 40% = 10% of the car is subsidized by the Dutch government. This totals to €2.500 for a €25.000 electric car (assuming there would be one).

The Vamil programme is a bit different. Let’s say the car is worth €2.500 after 5 years (of depreciation). Since you can now depreciate the car in just one year, this results in improved liquidity and calculating interest, this would also help companies a bit.

From what I’ve read, the maximum tax benefit you can get from the MIA and Vamil arrangements in €8.000.

Relating it back to my own situation

Well, as you can see above, the government has given lots of incentives for people to start buying electric cars. I’m in the lucky situation that I have a personal holding company. When buying an electric car, this would give me the opportunity to benefit from both the lower taxation for leased cars as well as the ionvestment benefit. Later on I’ll explain you how to will help make the decision to start driving an electric car (if I will actually do this ).

A few weeks ago I began analyzing how I use my car in order to figure out whether or not I would be able to use an electric car. So far, I’ve had a few days where I wasn’t able to use an electric car and last week was no exception. In fact, there wasn’t a single day I could have gone by with an electric car! I drove off to Switzerland (Zug specifically) Monday afternoon, after having finished some last bits of work in Haarlem in the morning. This is a trip of about 900 kilometers. With a single charge being only 180 kilometers (at least, that’s one of the criteria I settled for) I would never have been able to do this with an EV, without spending days getting there.

In Switzerland I picked up a friend of mine and we drove to Italy. In Italy, I spent a week in Perloz. Perloz is a little village near the base of the Gressoney Valley. We drove around Perloz and the surroundings quite a bit. Most of these days I probably could have gone by with an EV, but then again, I could not have gotten there in the first place with an EV.

Yesterday I drove back to Holland. We first drove to Arnad where we had lunch (with lots of Lardo, more on that later on). Then we drove back home. This totals to about 1050 kilometers, which could not have been done with an EV.

So, the conclusion for week 4 is that if holidays are the norm, I would not be able to drive an EV. This is going to be a challenge, but then again, these usually are quite fun to solve.

See you in a week!

On to week two of the ‘Will I be able to drive an electric car for most of my driving needs’ analysis. Last week I covered the week of August 3 to Augustu 9. On Sunday I was back in Holland and the weeks showed many appointments, so it promised to be a busy driving week. For more information on what I’m to with this analysis, please refer to the previous post about the analysis.

Reporting on week 2 (August 10 – August 16)

I’m still driving my brother’s Ford Fiesta and so far this has proved to be quite okay. I didn’t have to do any kiteboarding with it yet, so it’s still relatively clean and the fuel economy of the car is great! Let’s get on with week 2!

Monday August 10: I worked from home all day, so essentially I didn’t need the car. Later in the evening, I had an appointment with Ritsaart (my partner-in-crime when it comes to electric cars) in Amsterdam. We decided to meet up at Dauphine, a restaurant close to Amstel Station, which is about 20 minutes by train from Utrecht Central. Perfectly fit for a train ride you would say. But just as I wanted to leave it started to pour down like crazy. I lost my umbrella a few weeks ago and yet have to buy a new one. So with unfortunately I had to take the car. Back and forth from Utrecht to Dauphine is about 80 kilometers, so that’s what I drove today. Note to self: buy an umbrella!!

Tuesday August 11: I had a meeting at JTeam’s office today followed by a meeting in Hoofddorp, so I took the car to Amsterdam. The TNT head office is close to the train station I think, so I could have taken the train, but then again, the meetings were scheduled quite close to each other, so I couldn’t have made it by train. Total distance today (Utrecht – Amsterdam – Hoofddorp – Utrecht): about 125 km

Wednesday August 12: I had a meeting in the Northern part of Amsterdam, which is hard to reach by public transportation (until the new metro line is finished that is). So I took the car. After my meeting I went to JTeam’s office and after that traveled back home. Total distance: about 115 km.

Thursday August 13: I went to look at a house in Amsterdam in the morning, followed by a few hours at the Tendris office in Naarden. After that I had an appointment at Triodos bank in Zeist, followed by a short trip home. I took that car and traveled about 115 km today.

Friday August 14: Today I first traveled to Heeswijk to meet with APS Advertising. I then quickly drove to Haarlem, for a meeting with the Sock Puppet Heroes. This was followed by a short trip to Amsterdam. We had drinks in Amsterdam and I left the car there for the night. I traveled back to Utrecht by public transportation. Total distance today: 210 km

Saturday August 15: Perfect day for kiteboarding. 28 degrees Celcius, about 20 knots of wind. I accompanied Wouter who dropped me off at the office to pick up my car. Then we drove off to Wijk aan Zee to do some kiteboarding. We arrived at about 10.30 and drove back to Utrecht at about 2pm. Unfortunately with two cars, since I had left my car in Amsterdam. The rest of the day I spent in Utrecht. Myself, I drove about 100 km today.

Sunday August 16: No big travel day today. I cleaned the Ford Fiesta since it was about to be returned to Amersfoort to my brother. I drove there and took my own car back. This totals to about 45 km.

Conclusions so far

Monday	80 km	Yes, an EV would have fit perfectly for today!
Tuesday	125 km	Definitely a day for the EV, without having to charge!
Wednesday	115 km	This would also have worked using an EV
Thursday	115 km	Check!
Friday	250 km	In-between charging in Haarlem, this would have worked! But I set out the criteria to only include charging station at home and at the office, so let’s not count this one
Saturday	100 km	Yes, this would have worked
Sunday	45 km	This would have worked too!

Yesterday I was talking to a few friends of mine and they asked me what to do with the trips that exceed 200 km. I explained that in the future there will probably be fast-charging options for these trips or battery-swap stations. But I also told them that a one-car-fits-all scenario might possibly be something that’s not achievable in the near future with EVs. I was really happy with the swap I did with my brother and on top of that, I usually think carefully about taking the train for some trips and the car for others. Something like that will likely have to happen as well for longer trips if you have an EV. I explained them that you could for example take a alternative car for longer trips (a rental or something similar). There’s a car-sharing service in the Netherlands called Greenwheels. This would be an alternative. I’m getting lots of reactions though from people that hate the hassle of having to reserve a car in advance, so it’s not all perfect for them yet. We’ll have to think about that, but, for me it’s clear that thinking a bit more carefully about your driving patterns and which means of transportation you’re taking is going to take you a long way.

Next week

I have traded in my fuel efficient Ford Fiesta again for my X-Trail. One thing I’ve learnt: I can perfectly get by with a smaller car in the Netherlands only! Next week I have a few appointments here and there and on Friday I’ll be heading to Lowlands for the weekend. Let’s see what next week brings.

Yesterday, I posted on my little project of analyzing my driving needs. I hope to be able to draw some conclusions as to what it takes to start driving an electric car after I finish this.

For more info on how I’ll do this, please have a look at the post I did yesterday. Let’s move on to week 1 and see what driving I did!

Reporting on week 1 (August 3 – August 9)

Last Saturday I changed my own car for my brother’s Ford Fiesta. My brother will be heading to my house in Italy with his family and I offered him to use my car. The Fiesta is quite small and he wouldn’t be able to fit in his kids, all the toys and loads of other stuff that he wanted to take. So I’m driving a Ford Fiesta the coming two weeks.

Monday August 3: I worked from home today. I had an appointment with Jaap van’t Kruis and Stephanie Vermeulen (of Jimmy the Man Tours fame) at Central Station in Utrecht, which I did by bike.

Tuesday August 4: I had a meeting in Rotterdam today at the Kop van Zuid. I drove there by car, had my meeting, followed by lunch with Arjen Poutsma (of SpringSource fame). Next, I drove to Amsterdam to JTeam’s office. In the evening I drove home. This totals to about 200 kilometers. In retrospect, I could (and probably should) have taken the train to do these trips.

Wednesday August 5: This was a terrible day in some respects, a good one in others. I drove all the way from Utrecht to Eelde (close to Groningen in the morning) where I tested the Th!nk. Next, I traveled to Amsterdam for a meeting, followed by a meeting in Haarlem. After this I went home to Utrecht. this totals to about 450 kilometers in one day. No way I could have done these trips by train by the way.

Thursday August 6: In the morning I took the train to Schiphol Airport. There’s no way my getting from my home to Schiphol is faster by car than by train. Leaving my home about about 7.45am, I arrived at Schiphol at about 8.30am, followed by a plane ride to Milano Malpensa taking off at about 9.30am. In Italy, I took a rental (a Citroën C3, which is a really nice car by the way) and drove to Perloz, where my house is (this is about 150km).

Friday and Saturday August 7 and 8: I didn’t use the Citroën. Instead me, my brother and his family took my own car out for rides in the valley. We went various places to hike, have lunch, dinner, et cetera. Probably we drove about 150km these two days

Sunday August 9: I took a plane back to Amsterdam, which arrived with lots of delays at Schiphol at about 10.30pm. I took the train back to Utrecht, which takes about 30 minutes.

Conclusions so far

First, the stats:

Monday	0 km	No car needed
Tuesday	200 km	Could have done with EV, with a bit of charging at JTeam’s office
Wednesday	450 km	No way this day an EV given the criteria would have sufficed
Thursday	50 km	For the trips to Schiphol, yes, an EV would have sufficed. Let’s not start talking about EV rentals yet…
Friday	0 km	See previous remark. No EV rentals.
Saturday	0 km	See previous remark. No EV rentals.
Sunday	50 km	The trip back from Schiphol could have been done with an EV But then again, I wouldn’t do that even if I had one, because of the insane costs for parking at Schiphol airport

So far by the way I’m really liking the Ford Fiesta. The fuel economy is great compared to my X-Trail (with about 15 km per liter at least, compared to 10 km per liter in my X-Trail).

The week from August 10 to August 16…

is going to be filled with appointments too, so I guess this will be a pretty kilometer-heavy week too. I’ll report back on this week in a few days

Many people I talk to about EVs regularly ask me what going to happen with these 2 trips per year they take to Maastricht from Groningen, or even better, that one skiing trip to Switzerland or Austria in Winter. As I’m currently working a lot on how to make electric vehicles as interesting for everybody as soon as possible and because obviously I need to start driving an electric car myself as well, I thought I’d do a little analysis on my driving patterns. As the analysis will show, I have pretty strong demands when it comes to my car, so I guess if I can drive an electric car for my daily needs, probably a lot of other people can as well.

I’ll first explain you my current situation. Following, I’ll be reporting about the travel I did in the past weeks. I’ll continue to report on my travel for the coming two to three weeks. I think I’ll have covered pretty much everything when it comes to my car needs. So hopefully we’ll be able to draw a conclusion on what it takes for me to start driving an electric car.

Every post, I’ll conclude with some stats. I’ll tell if I could have gone by with an electric car, based on the following assumptions:

• Range of the EV of about 180km
• Charging stations at home and at my office(s)
• Charge time for a single charge of at least 5 hours
• If I don’t use the car on any particular day, or if I’m abroad and using a rental or something similar, I’ll simply refrain from judging whether or not it could have been done with an EV. I’ll still evaluate days I’m traveling by train in Holland though. This means that going to Amsterdam by train (back and forth) from Utrecht will count as a yes, but traveling from Utrecht to Maastricht on the same day with not enough charging options in between will count as a no, because of the 180km range

I you have questions by the way or stuff that I should pay attention too in my analysis, let me know!

[update] There was a question about the range and why I picked 180 km as a range. While there are cars that do more and cars that do less, I had to pick something. It’s not entirely arbitrary though. In the Netherlands, there’s a manufacturer or retrofit VW Golf EVs. These do about 180 km on one charge. The Lotus Elise they produce also does 180 km. There’s another reason why I picked 180 km and I’ll elaborate more on that later on. Let’s just say that IMO it’s safe to say that 180 is a range many of the modern-day EVs will (at least) have.

My situation

I use my car a lot. I live in Utrecht, frequently travel to JTeam’s office in Amsterdam (Frederiksplein, near the Dutch Central Bank) and Tendris’ office in Naarden. Also, I have lots of appointments throughout the Netherlands (ranging from Eelde, close to Groningen in the North to Heeswijk, in the South of the Netherlands).

Together with a few friends I own a house in Italy, in the Alps, about 1000km from my home in Utrecht. I love skiing and hiking, so I go there both in Winter and in Summer. Sometimes I used the car to go there.

Last but not least, I do kiteboarding. Utrecht in not so close to the sea, so I travel to the North Sea shore a lot to get some airtime. I usually go there after work or in the weekends.

I drive a second-hand Nissan X-Trail 2.5. Granted, this is not the most efficient car when it comes to fuel economy (averaging 10km on the liter). I bought the X-Trail for my trips to Italy and the days I go kiteboarding. Kiteboarding on the beach gives a big mess (lots of sand in your car) and the house in Italy is in a very mountainous area with lots of gravel roads, so a 4×4 comes in very handy. If I would not have taken these two thing into account, I would probably have bought a way smaller car. I was hoping to drive only 10.000 kilometers per year, but unfortunately this has not happened . I bought the car in February and the car has since, driven about 17.000km. To be honest, I’m not very happy with the current situation .

So, what’s next?

Well, tomorrow I’ll post on my (car) travel in the first week of August. Like I said, I’ll report about 4 weeks of using my car to get around town and the Netherlands and after that I’ll draw some conclusions. I hope you like it!

This post is part of a series. Read more about Week 1, Week 2, Week 3 and week 4.

A few weeks ago, I blogged about my venturing into the land of electric vehicles. A lot has happened since and are happening still. We’re busy filling in the details of our initiative.

We’ve settled on a name for the company, which I’m still keeping to myself for a little while . We first played around with ideas like ReMove (too negative), The Good Guys (to corny) and Stroming but these were all ditched.

Currently, Ritsaart is busy working on the supplier and financial side of things and I’m focusing more on the customer-facing side, initially the launch of our website, which is due somewhere late August hopefully.

I’ve visited quite a few companies the last few months that all deal with electric vehicles in one way or another. I met with Liander to talk about the impact of all these vehicles on the power grid. I visited ECE to have a look at their efforts to transform normal cars into electric cars (retrofitting in EV speak). The day after tomorrow I’m off to Elmonet, which is importing one of the smaller electric vehicles available, the Think, into the Netherlands. There have been plenty of talks with lots of entrepreneurs from companies such as Ecomovement, Mister Green and more. Then there have been a few networking events as well.

We’re working towards a big announcement on the 8th of September, so more news after that. Also, we’ll be featured in the next newsletter of the Nationale Postcode Loterij (a big lottery in the Netherlands), which is sent out to all their members (I believe to over 2mln people in the Netherlands). So that should definitely help getting the word out.

It’s fun starting something up again and it really feels like this is the next step. Joost and me built JTeam from the ground up to where it is now with no outside help (approx. 25 people). SpringSource was a tad more complex with 7 original founders, offices throughout the world from the start and soon after that a big chunk of venture capital. This’ll be the first time I’m venturing into consumer-land; JTeam and SpringSource all pretty much are in the B2B area (although SpringSource definitely had a fair share of marketing to individuals in it).

The company will be a Tendris company. Tendris is one of the Dutch pioneers when it comes to sustainable business’. So far, Tendris really has proven to be of great support, with a solid network, people with great ideas and a nice office near the woods in Naarden .

Last but not least, obviously, I’m going to drive an electric car myself as well. After our site has launched, I’ll probably blog more about that on the company blog (which hasn’t been set up yet). It’ll be quite a challenge to satisfy all my transportation needs, as I’m using my car quite regularly and also for long distances. But then again, if I can do it, more people should be able to, right? I’m currently driving a not to efficient Nissan X-Trail. I bought this car back in February (this year) in the hope that I would not be driving that much, therefore saving on fuel. That unfortunately has not happened, so all the more reason to switch to electric, I would say .

More updates later on!

Yesterday, the current administration in the Netherlands announced a new fiscal package to stimulate the use and development of electric cars and the industry needed to support it. In addition to a fiscal benefit for people owning a leased car (taxation on the electric lease cars was dropped to 10% a few weeks ago) electric cars purchased by companies will now render an extra €8000 benefit. In addition, there will be no road taxes anymore and also the luxury tax that in effect for cars in the Netherlands will no longer hold for electric vehicles.

Last but not least, the government is going to set an example by converting her fleet to electric vehicles where possible.

I think this is a good move. Holland is a small country. Distances for a single trip almost never exceed the range of current electric cars available on the market and the power grid in Holland is reliable and well set up.

All these measures basically mean that quite quickly, electric cars will be within reach for the public in Holland.

Now, you might think: why is this guy who used to be working for one of the leaders in the Enterprise Java space rambling on about electric vehicles.

Well, the thing is, after I decided to take some off, I pretty quickly ran into a few guys that were thinking about setting up a new initiative in the Dutch market related to electric vehicles. After having talked with them for quite a while I decided to team up with them and start working on getting this off the ground.

There’s nothing much to tell at the moment (or at least, nothing that would interest you much), but there will definitely be a few EV-related posts on this blog from now on I think.

And, we’re doing a small bit of market research starting next week or so. Unfortunately only for Dutchies. Keep an eye out for more news.

p.s. this doesn’t mean I’m not involved with JTeam anymore by the way. For now, I’m spending time on both JTeam and on the market for electric cars.