Knowledge@Wharton: What message would you like to give high school students about the cars
and car industry of the future? And how can they get involved with Better Place?
Agassi: First thing they have to remember is that their first car will be electric. The young
generation today understands that ... we don't have enough oil in the ground and we don't have enough of an atmosphere to sustain them until they die if we don't switch early. And the earlier we switch ... the easier it is going to be to recover from what we -- our generation and the generations of the past -- have done to this planet, and the abuse that we've [inflicted on] natural resources .... And so the first thing to remember is your future is electric.
The second thing is that this is one of the most exciting times in this industry. We will have a billion electric cars on the road sometime around 2025 because we will have a billion people [driving] and there's no way they can be [driving] gasoline cars. Between now and 2025, a billion new cars need to be added and there will not be any industry that will be more exciting than this one. If you think of an industry that will make a billion of something, [with an average price of] $20,000, you're looking at a $20 trillion industry rising up from nothing today within the span of 10 to 15 years.
Those are the kinds of [things] that made Silicon Valley a great place to work and made biotechnology a great place to work and made the Internet such a fun place to be part of in 1995. If they're looking for something that will be the next big industry, there's no doubt in my mind that the electric car is the next big thing and that $20 trillion is just the core of this industry. There'll be batteries and services, innovation and new product technology. Everything will be reinvented and they've got to think of a way to get into this industry while they can.
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