It also provides rapid charging at the centres so drivers have the option of a fast charge – about half an hour - or battery swapping.

The centres are able to replace depleted for fully-charged batteries in minutes – roughly the same time as it takes to fill up with diesel and pay.

Renault has agreed to supply 100,000 Fluence EVs into Israel to give the country access to the cars it needs to create critical mass.

There are still many other issues to resolve: how many and which battery packs each centre will need to stock, whether the centres be able to cope with every EV that comes to market, whether future EVs will have their battery packs easily accessible and what happens to batteries that are leased separately and are therefore not the property of the car owner.

These are issue that Better Place and EV makers need to resolve, but what the arrival of this company will do is resolve one very major issue for fleets – lack of range.

“This allows high-mileage drivers to use EVs,” Anthony Bernbaum, head of global special operations for HSBC and the man that has gambled millions of the banks’ pounds on Better Place’s success, told a Frost and Sullivan conference on electric vehicles last week.

“This means they get the benefits of the reduced wholelife costs that an EV brings.”

Better Place he says is going after the high-mileage and therefore high-margin petrol and diesel car users, who currently spend some $2 to $3 trillion a year on fuel.