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Better Place Electric Car visitor centre opens

Better Place have opened a visitor centre in Israel to demonstrate their battery swap technology for electric cars Last October we wrote about a start-up company in Israel – Better Place – that had a new way forward for electric cars by taking the purchase of battery packs out of the equation, and was developing a system for ‘Battery Swap’ stations where electric car owners could drive in and swap their battery pack for a fully-charged one in a few minutes. That story first brought to our attention our favourite quote of last year – by Nissan boss Carlos Ghosn – who said “A hybrid is like a mermaid: if you want a fish, you get a woman; if you want a woman, you get a fish.” Which probably explained why Nissan – and its partner Renault – got involved with Better Place. Better Place aims to address the main concerns of electric car drivers by making the battery packs in electric cars ‘swappable’.

Mercedes SLS AMG Gullwing – official photos

Mercedes has now sent us a big photo gallery of the SLS AMG Gullwing But Mercedes has now released all the official images, so we thought you ought to get to judge the whole deal for yourself. The leaked images we had looked much better than we’d expected, and the SLS does look good – a sort of Z4 on steroids mixed with design cues from the original 300SL Gullwing. But even though the SLS will be at Frankfurt next week it won’t be launched until 2011.

Google Car (self) drives into the future [w/video]

After years of speculation, Google finally announced its Google Car autonomous vehicle at the Recode Code Conference in Palos Verdes, CA yesterday. Google CEO Sergey Brin unveiled the company's new two-seat, driverless vehicle at the software conference, underlining the company's aim of drastically reducing road deaths and injuries caused by human error, particularly by distracted drivers. "We're now exploring what fully self-driving vehicles would look like by building some prototypes; they'll be designed to operate safely and autonomously without requiring human intervention," said Brin.