Here’s an interesting thought: Could Silicon Valley be the catalyst for the development of the electric car?

Matt Neumann of the San Jose Mercury thinks so. In his article on the subject he highlights several efforts underway in the area, notably those of Shai Agassi, former exec at SAP. The latter has raised over $200mn in VC funding in an effort to get electric cars on city streets, noting that “Detroit is a car manufacturing center. I think what we’re looking at is not something that can be done in a normal way. . . . It needs an Internet approach, a Google approach.”

I’ll let you do the reading yourself but what struck my eyes was the following, “(Agassi’s) plan calls for Better Place to partner with carmakers whose products will use the company’s batteries and charging/swap stations. If consumers commit to a long enough contract for power,  Agassi argued, they could even get cars for free – just like with mobile phones and service plans.”

Evidently, that may be a lot of wishful thinking but if you’re one of the Big Three or the New Three (Toyota, Honda, Hyundai) you’ve got to be either concerned at the disruptive potential of projects like these, or enamoured with the potential that collaboration with such innovative projects could produce.

Either way, check out the project site at Project Better Place.