The Israeli government announced a major initiative to push the nation's drivers toward electric cars on Monday, a move meant to both lessen dependence on foreign oil and address the environmental and health hazards of gas-burning vehicles.

It is not the first time a government has tried to promote electric cars on a mass scale. A 1990 California mandate requiring automakers to sell zero-emissions vehicles famously flopped. But the Israeli attempt is far more sophisticated than anything that precedes it. It aligns policy makers and a major car company with an outfit prepared to build hundreds of thousands of electric charging stations across the country. In an interview with TIME, Israeli President Shimon Peres called the project, "an experimental lab, a pilot project, before it's applied to other, bigger industrialized nations."

Serendipity is the mother of all inventions," one famous adage says. In the case of Anders Jones, serendipity came knocking at the tender age of 14. In 2001, on a spring break visit to Jamaica on the way to the beach, a conversation with a taxi driver changed his life.